

Class 
Book. 



Copyright^ . 



COPYRIGHT DEPOSIT, 



BY THE SAME AUTHOR. 

THE CHRISTIAN'S DAY. 

A Book of Meditations. 

i2mo, 257 pp. Price $1.50. 

Contents: I. — Prayer. II. — Meditation. III.— 
Temptation. IV. — Repentance. V. — Confession. 
VI.— Relation to Others. VII.— Work. VIII. - 
Pain. IX. — Discipline. X. — The Supernatural. 
XL — Thanksgiving. 



MEDITATIONS ON THE OFFICE AND WORK 
OF THE HOLY SPIRIT. 

i2m.o, 257 pp. Price $1.50. 

Contents: 1. Being and Worship of the Holy 
Spirit. 2. The Being and Worship, Continued. 
3. The Holy Spirit in Inspiration and in the 
Church. 4. The Holy Spirit Guiding into Truth. 
5. The Holy Spirit and the Conscience. 6. Con- 
version. 7. The Comforter. 8. A Personal Friend 
and Guide. 9. Zeal. 10. Sanctity. 



MEDITATIONS 

on the 

APOSTLES' CREED 



BY 

THE REVEREND J. G. H. BARRY, D.D. 

Author of 
'Meditations on the Office and Work of the Holy Spirit, 

"The Christian's Day," Etc. 



NEW YORK 

EDWIN S. GORHAM, PUBLISHER 

1912 



I 



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Copyright 

by 

Edwin S. Gorham 

1912 



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©CU332023 
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§] Co tlK memory of my motlKr, 



PREFACE 

I began to write these meditations in response to 
an invitation to give a course of spiritual instruc- 
tions ; but circumstances altered, and the course was 
not given beyond the first six meditations. I had, 
however, become interested in the work and went 
on with it, and subsequently used some of the med- 
itations in retreats given in two Religious Houses. 
Later, the meditations were used as parochial medi- 
tations in my parish of S. Mary the Virgin. I now 
venture to print them in hopes of a wider audience. 

In revising them for the press I have not thought 
it needful to remove all traces of their origin and 
first use; and there will be found occasional allu- 
sions to matters pertaining to the Religious Life and 
to parochial conditions. I keep these, trusting that 
the meditations will be read by some, at least, of 
those who listened to them when they were deliv- 
ered, and that they will not regret to have old mem- 
ories revived. 

The object that I have kept always before me has 
been so to present the teaching of the Creed that 
the practical bearing of its doctrinal statements on 
the daily life of the Christian may be clear, and that 
the passage from intellectual acceptance to effective 
action may be facilitated. If I have failed in this, 
I have failed in the purpose with which I set out. 



CONTENTS 



I. I Believe 

II. I Believe 

III. I Believe in God 

IV. The Father Almighty 
V. Maker of Heaven and Earth . 

VI. And in Jesus 

VII. Christ ...... 

VIII. His Only Son 

IX. Our Lord 

X. Who Was Conceived by the Holy Ghost 

XL Born of the Virgin Mary 

XII. Suffered Under Pontius Pilate, Was 

Crucified 

XIII. Dead and Buried .... 

XIV. He Descended Into Hell . 
XV. The Third Day He Rose Again From 

the Dead 

XVI. And Ascended Into Heaven 
XVII. And Sitteth on the Right Hand of 

God the Father Almighty . 
XVIII. From Thence He Shall Come to Judge 
the Quick and the Dead 
XIX. I Believe in the Holy Ghost . 
XX. The Holy Catholic Church . 
XXI. The Communion of Saints 
XXII. The Forgiveness of Sins . 

XXIII. The Resurrection of the Body 

XXIV. The Life Everlasting 



page 
3 

21 

39 
59 
79 

101 

127 
153 
173 
195 

217 

238 
261 

283 

305 
329 

353 

379 

401 

423 
445 
469 
491 

513 



THE FIRST MEDITATION 



THE FIRST MEDITATION 

I BELIEVE 

Let us listen to the Word of God — 

HND the Lord God formed man of the dust 
of the ground, and breathed into his nos- 
trils the breath of life; and man became a 
living soul. 

Let us picture — 

The creation of man. His creation is the end of 
a long process. The earth has gradually passed out 
of the state of chaos to an ordered state wherein it 
becomes possible that life can exist. We see the 
long procession of living forms passing from those 
lowest forms that we can scarcely distinguish from 
the not living, to the complex forms of the higher 

3 



4 MEDITATIONS ON THE APOSTLES' CREED 

animals. Some of them look like men, even seem 
caricatures of men; but they are not men. Then 
there is a new act of God. God breathes into that 
which is mere dust of the earth the breath of life, 
and it becomes a living soul. It has been changed 
from the likeness of the animal to the likeness of 
God. Let us contemplate the first Man, endowed 
with self-consciousness, recognising that he is dif- 
ferent from the brutes about him. 

Consider, first — 

That God, in creating man, was creating a being 
in some sense like himself. His end was to bring 
the creature into union with himself; and between 
God and the brute creation there was no point of 
contact. That the creation should be raised to God, 
it was needful that God should stoop to the crea- 
tion. If the creature was to partake of him, he 
must impart himself to the creature. So man was 
made in the Divine Image. There is given him the 
power of knowing God. We should describe this 
to-day by saying that man has a spiritual nature. 

Think of the love of God that is implied in this 
creation of man. It was not to enjoy the gifts of 
the natural world that God made man ; man could 
have enjoyed those as an animal. Man was made 
to enjoy God. God desired to impart himself. He 



I BELIEVE 5 

made man to be a partaker of his own immortality 
and glory. 

Consider, second — 

That the process which was incomplete in the 
first man, is become complete in you. Human na- 
ture, in the Incarnation, has been taken up into 
God, and is permanently raised to heaven. You 
have been taken into the Incarnate Body of Christ 
and raised to dwell with him in heavenly places. 
Consider what possibilities that implies for you. 
Here, in this world, we are only at the beginning of 
our course. We are beings of infinite possibilities. 
This spiritual nature of ours, that we feel so dimly 
here, has in it the promise and the potency of an 
heavenly realisation. It is such a tremendous thing 
to be the child of God now; but what of the future ? 
"Beloved, now are we the sons of God, and it doth 
not yet appear what we shall be." Through all the 
ages of eternity we shall grow near and nearer to 
him; the powers of our spiritual personality will 
expand with the demands made on them and the 
opportunities placed before them. If the love of 
God, now seen darkly, can transform us here ; what 
shall it be when we see face to face, and know even 
as we are known ? 



6 MEDITATIONS ON THE APOSTLES' CREED 

Let us, then, pray — 

For a deeper realisation of the possibilities of our 
nature; that we may think of our present attain- 
ments as but feeble steps towards our true destiny. 
Pray for closer union with God in whose image we 
are created. 

God, with whom is the Well of life, and in 
whose light we see light ; increase in us, we beseech 
thee, the brightness of divine knowledge, whereby 
we may be able to reach thy plenteous fountain; 
impart to our thirsting souls the draught of life, and 
restore to our darkened minds the light from 
heaven ; through Jesus Christ, our Lord. 

1 am going, in these meditations, to consider with 
you the Articles of the Apostles' Creed. We usually 
think of the Creed from a dogmatic standpoint, as 
it states for the intellect the truths of the Christian 
Revelation. But there is another point of view from 
which we may consider it, and one that is very 
profitable — the devotional. Dogma is for the pur- 
pose, not of satisfying the curiosity, but of sup- 
porting the spiritual life. Dogma is good for me in 
proportion as I can assimilate it and translate its 
truths from propositions received by the intellect 
to active, energising principles of conduct in my 



I BELIEVE 7 

personal experience. We shall, no doubt, have to 
return to this point later on. 

To-day I want you to think with me of the fact 
that the profession of faith is a personal matter. 
/ believe, we say. It is a personal adhesion to, and 
a personal action upon, the truth. The ground of 
our profession lies in the fact that we have a per- 
sonal relation to God. The end of the Incarnation 
was to effect that relation, and its outworking in 
personal religion means for us the strengthening of 
that personal relation. 

What a wonderful thing it is that there should be 
such a relation as that ! The two terms of the rela- 
tion seem so utterly remote! There is the infinite 
and eternal God ; and there is the creature whom he 
has made. Men have been so stunned by the 
thought of their own insignificance in the universe 
that they have despaired of the possibility of know- 
ing God at all; and have rejected religion, with its 
claim that God cares for man, as an inconceivable 
absurdity. But it is just the wonder of the Revela- 
tion that it puts aside this, the almost commonsense 
view, and makes known to us the love of God and 
the care of God for the individual soul. No doubt, 
"the heavens declare the glory of God and the firma- 
ment showeth his handiwork" ; but nevertheless, I 
am not lost in the vastness of the creation, but stand 
forth God's creature too; nay, his redeemed child, 



8 MEDITATIONS ON THE APOSTLES' CREED 

to add my voice to the mighty chorus. I can indeed 
feel that the harmony of that chorus is not perfect 
till I have contributed my personal note of praise 
and adoration ; till I too have said, I believe in God. 

It is the assertion of my complete and independ- 
ent personality. That is my ultimate significance, 
that I am an entity in myself; that there is some 
determining force in me that makes my action a 
distinct thing. That is what gives it value. 

There have been those — there are still those — 
who have looked upon personality as an impossible 
thing or an evil thing. The Pantheist denies the 
personality of God. God, to him, is the infinite life 
of the universe, palpitant in every blade of grass, 
revealing itself in the song of the bird, realising 
itself in the myriad-formed life of nature. Con- 
scious life is but a bubble on the surface of the 
infinite unconscious life of the world. We rise out 
of that life to a momentary consciousness and seem 
to ourselves to be independent personal existences ; 
but at last 

the sunrise comes : 
The dew-drop slips into the shining sea. 

To some who have taken this view of our self- 
conscious personality, it has seemed a very awful 
thing, because it seems to them to imply a certain 
separation from the divine life of the universe. We 



I BELIEVE 9 

are tossed out from that life into some separate and 
restless existence; we throb and agonise with the 
pain of an individual life; we wander homeless 
through the fields of earth, unquiet in our separate- 
ness ; we are exiles from God, and our only thought 
should be to escape from exile and return to him; 
to escape from mortal existence into the abyss of 
the unknown life where one loses this restless, sep- 
arate, suffering personality in the divine uncon- 
sciousness of the All. Death is triumph and escape ; 
then we may say to the restless heart, 

rest then forever, 
Thou hast throbbed thy fill. 

But to life enlightened by Revelation this were 
the supreme misfortune. The last thing that one 
would lose would be just this eager, throbbing per- 
sonality ; for it is the possession of that that enables 
us to know and love God. God is a person ; and in 
my own way, and under my own limitations, I am a 
person too. There can be between us, therefore, 
that intimate relation that we call personal; a 
relation of love and sympathy and knowledge; a 
relation of action and mutual intercourse. I can 
understand God because I am made in his image 
and renewed in his likeness. I can love God be- 
cause I am like him in the nature that he has 
created and has himself assumed. The loss of 



IO MEDITATIONS ON THE APOSTLES CREED 

personality would be to me infinite loss — the loss 
of all that gives me significance, the loss of con- 
scious communion with God. 

But when I ask myself just what my personality 
is, I do not find it easy to define or to describe. 
Personality seems to exist in my feeling of one- 
ness that endures through all changes ; of separa- 
tion from all others ; of the possibility of separate 
and self-originated action. I am conscious of my- 
self, and that self appears to be quite like a multi- 
tude of other selves, and yet it is quite distinct 
from them all. My profession of belief, for 
example, is a distinct act expressing a unique 
allegiance to the God in whom I believe. We shall 
get at this matter best, I think, not by trying to 
find a complete definition of self, but by looking at 
the manner in which self acts in the affirmation of 
belief. 

The first element of personality that I discover 
is the self-conscious reason. I am able to under- 
stand propositions ; to discern likeness and unlike- 
ness in the world about me ; to make comparisons, 
to draw inferences; in short, I can interpret the 
world. There is a correspondence between my- 
self and the universe that makes it possible for 
me to move in it freely as one to whom it is not a 
closed book; I can comprehend it through study. 
Now it is this power that I bring to bear on the 



I BELIEVE II 

facts of Revelation as they are presented to me by 
the Creed. Within limits, and so far as is neces- 
sary for me for the guidance of my life, I under- 
stand these facts. When I say, "I believe in God," 
no doubt I do not understand all that "God" may 
mean, but I do know that I have a perfectly defi- 
nite meaning- that is then present to my mind. The 
word "God" transcends my meaning; but what- 
ever God is in himself, my meaning is included. 
And the same is true of the other articles of the 
Creed. 

My primary attitude toward the Creed, then, is 
an attitude of understanding. My reason must 
deal with each proposition and penetrate its 
meaning, and set its objects before me as intelli- 
gible objects of thought. There is, to be sure, the 
attitude of the child or of the ignorant person be- 
fore the same fact, accepting what it is taught; 
but that is an attitude of the will rather than of 
the reason; the passive acceptance of another's 
reason, rather than the exertion of one's own. 

We need to remember that this effort of the 
reason in understanding is a dependent action, its 
success being conditioned on the submission of 
ourselves in reason, as in all things else, to the 
will of God. It must not take place in proud and 
complacent reliance on self. In seeking to under- 
stand the meaning of our Creed we have to re- 



12 MEDITATIONS ON THE APOSTLES' CREED 

member that the Creed is the Revelation of the 
mind of God. We see into these mysteries so far, 
and only so far, as he has willed to unveil them. 
To comprehend them at all needs something more 
than just the exercise of the human understanding; 
it needs the exercise of that understanding enlight- 
ened by God himself. He that would seek to un- 
derstand must pray constantly for the gift of under- 
standing, which is one of the gifts of the Holy 
Spirit. 

It is easy to see that the purely rational attitude 
is an imperfect one. One can believe all the arti- 
cles of the Christian Faith without being in any 
real sense of the word a Christian. Yet this first 
act of our personality, this first step of intellectual 
comprehension, may be fruitful if it leads to the 
wonder and the awe which God and his works in- 
spire in the imaginative mind. "Transcendent 
wonder," Carlyle defined religion; and that cer- 
tainly is the root of the matter. But the cold light 
of the reason does not contain this wonder; and in 
mentioning it we are moving on to the second 
element of our personality which comes into oper- 
ation to complete the act of belief, the feelings. 

The feelings or the emotions are stirred to ac- 
tion by the contemplation of the facts of Revela- 
tion. It is customary to say that the feelings are 
not and cannot be the test in matters of religion. 



I BELIEVE 13 

That is perfectly true. We cannot judge of the 
truth of a doctrine by its appeal to our emotions. 
We cannot judge of the value of a prayer by the 
amount of feeling that we can put into it. When 
I receive the Blessed Sacrament I cannot judge of 
its effect by the amount of emotion that it stirs. 
When I go through the religious routine of my 
day I cannot estimate its spiritual value by its 
conscious reaction. Superficially, emotion is a mat- 
ter of nerves and temperament mostly. But all 
that does not hinder that the emotions, as an ele- 
ment of personality, have a very important part 
to play in religion. Our feelings are what stimu- 
late us to action, and action is easier in propor- 
tion as they are stirred. Persuasion that is ad- 
dressed to the intellect alone is apt to be ineffective ; 
it must include the emotions in its appeal. The 
feelings more often control the reason than the 
reason the feelings. We are attracted or repelled 
by objects that excite corresponding emotions in 
us. "The reason is the faculty that enables us to 
frame a mental picture of the world correspond- 
ing to the external reality. It would show that the 
total suffering caused by the destruction of the 
world was greater than the suffering caused by 
the scratching of my finger. But unless I were 
benevolent to feel for others, the bare fact would 
not impel me to scratch my finger to save the 



14 MEDITATIONS ON THE APOSTLES' CREED 

world. ... If I were malevolent instead of 
benevolent, it might have the contrary effect. . . . 
The reason may regulate and guide the passions 
by enabling us to compare their objects. It cannot 
supply the place of the passions." 

Now the facts of the Christian Revelation are 
such as are calculated to stir emotion and stimu- 
late action. The glory and the beauty of God; his 
kindness and compassion ; our dependence upon him 
and his loving care of us ; the figure of the Incar- 
nate Saviour and the incidents of his earthly life; 
the moving power of his passion and death; all 
these appeal directly to my emotional nature. I 
may be convinced by a treatise on the atonement; 
I am moved by the sight of a crucifix. A treatise 
on Providence forces the assent of my reason; but 
the vision of the Good Shepherd seeking the lost 
thrills me with love and gratitude. 

Complete religious experience, because it de- 
mands the complete action of the personality, 
demands the exercise of the emotions. The appeal 
to them is legitimate; the exercise of them is nec- 
essary. The provision for worship with such sur- 
roundings as shall excite in us the sense of awe, 
stir in us that feeling of the mysticity of things, 
which it is largely the function of ritual to pro- 
duce, is not legitimate merely, but its proper func- 
tion. Lights and vestments, incense and bells, are 



I BELIEVE 15 

not a puerile sestheticism, but a rational use of 
means to produce desirable ends ; to evoke habitual 
feelings, to excite emotions that shall facilitate the 
transition from objects intellectually conceived to 
the action appropriate to them. If ritual is illegiti- 
mate then are all the arts. If it is legitimate to 
produce emotional states by music and oratory, 
then it is by ritual. The preacher who in some 
bare Meeting House has stirred his audience to a 
high emotional pitch no doubt thinks of himself as 
having appealed to their intellect ; but in reality he 
has effected nothing more than is effected by the 
ritual that he despises. Modern education has 
grasped this fact which was perceived by religion 
from the beginning, and has set itself to produce 
the intellectual and moral habits that it wants, not 
by drill in intellectual formulae but by the reitera- 
tion of action calculated to produce the required 
habit. It is recognised that a flag drill is better 
than a lecture on patriotism for the purpose of 
stirring emotion toward one's country. People 
who do not believe in prayer as a means of moving 
God, believe that the practise of prayer has an 
exceedingly beneficial effect on the character of 
the person who prays. The participation in wor- 
ship that presents its objects impressively to the 
imagination and stirs the worshiper to emotions of 
love and pity and gratitude, tends to make those 



1 6 MEDITATIONS ON THE APOSTLES' CREED 

qualities a permanent part of his spiritual experi- 
ence in a way and with a success that no merely 
intellectual appeal can. We learn to understand 
by understanding, and we learn to love by loving; 
but we cannot learn to love by understanding. 

For it is only through the emotional state that 
we arrive at action. It is useless to talk about man 
as though he were a being of pure reason : he cer- 
tainly is not. He acts as the outcome of emotional 
states. It is the emotions and not the intellect 
that move the will. That is the last element of 
personality that we have to deal with — the will. 
Man acts when he wills to act. His whole morality 
is in the will. It is not the thing that my reason 
assents to, it is not the thing that emotionally stirs 
me, it is the thing that I will to do that determines 
my character. Rational assent to the facts of our 
Lord's life does not make me his disciple. Vivid 
admiration of his devotion to his mission and of 
his self-sacrificing death in fulfilling it will not 
change my character to one like his. It is the 
efficacious will to be like him that changes my 
character and leads me to follow the blessed steps 
of his most holy life. All who would lead a Chris- 
tian life must in the first place attend to the nature 
of their willing. 

I become what I will to become : that is the 
maxim that we need before us all the time. I may 
not be to-day what I will to be. My character may 



MEDITATIONS ON THE APOSTLES' CREED 1 7 

be imperfectly disciplined; my passions may be 
unsubdued; I may not have succeeded in dominat- 
ing my circumstances. Still I do not despair: I 
never despair of anything, for I am certain that I 
shall become what I will to become. If the will is 
in me to realise myself as the child of God I shall 
ultimately succeed. Great holiness is great willing. 
In speaking of these elements of personality — 
these contents of the / — I do not wish to be un- 
derstood as implying that these are separate things 
or act separately. They are all functions of the 
one personality. My reason never acts, but I feel 
and will; I never feel, but I understand and will; 
I never will, but I understand and feel. We speak 
of these as separate acts because in each act one 
or the other of them is predominant. It is as 
though personality showed now one side and now 
another, as we ourselves show to one another, now 
the gloom of our depression, and then the agony 
of our tears, and again the fervor of our love. We 
are one ; and our act of faith is one ; but with the 
shifting moments it is rational or emotional or 
active. Or it is one or the other of these character- 
istically. But the perfect act of faith, the ideal 
attitude toward God and his Revelation, is one 
that may be conceived as originating in the under- 
standing of God, and passing through the love that 
the vision of him kindles, to the action of a pas- 
sionate devotion to his will. 



THE SECOND MEDITATION 



THE SECOND MEDITATION 

I BELIEVE 

Let us listen to the words of the Nobleman — 
Sir, come down ere my child die. 

Let us try to picture the scene — 

^^HIS man is under the pressure of a great 
Wl^, need. Some of us, perhaps, can understand 
something of his feelings. We have stood 
by the bedside of a child whom we love; we have 
watched through the hours the progress of the 
disease ; we have felt the impotence of all that we 
could do to save. So it has been with this father. 
See, on his face, the lines of suffering, the symbol 
of his exceeding grief. Now he hears that our 
Lord has come out of Judea into Galilee and a ray 
of hope comes into his soul. Surely this man can 

21 



22 MEDITATIONS ON THE APOSTLES' CREED 

save, if only he will. This Prophet has saved so 
many others, why should not he too find help? 
Imagine the eagerness with which he acts upon 
this thought; see him come hastily into the pres- 
ence of our Lord; hear the urgency of his appeal. 
And then how unexpected are our Lord's words. 
They seem almost harsh in the way in which they 
check the eagerness of this man: "Except ye see 
signs and wonders, ye will not believe." But the 
Nobleman will not be checked ; his need is too 
pressing, his confidence in the power of our Lord 
is too great: "Sir, come down ere my child die." 
Our Lord cannot resist that appeal. "Go thy way; 
thy son liveth." 

Consider, first — 

That what the Nobleman had heard about our 
Lord had probably not made a very profound im- 
pression. There is no reason to suppose that he 
had taken any steps to become his disciple. He 
had, perhaps, listened with languid curiosity to 
stories, of which there were, no doubt, many in 
circulation, of the wonderful deeds wrought by the 
strange Teacher; but he had not thought it neces- 
sary to acquire any definite convictions of the na- 
ture of our Lord's work or of his mission. The 
thing that awoke in him a conviction about our 



I BELIEVE 23 

Lord was the conviction of his own need of him. 
His child lay there, tossing with pain, visibly dying. 
Then all that he had heard about our Lord crys- 
talized into a profound conviction of his power to 
help. This conviction was so deep that he waved 
aside all questions of proof and went directly to the 
heart of the matter. He throws himself in pas- 
sionate faith on the person of our Lord. 

I wonder if we may not see in the seeming 
harshness of our Lord's words to him an echo of 
some former thought of his own? When others 
had told him of some wonderful work wrought by 
the Prophet of Galilee had he, perhaps, expressed 
a skepticism toward him? Had he said, Except I 
see signs and wonders, I will not believe? But if 
skepticism there had been, it is swept away for- 
ever. 

Consider, second — 

How little our belief in God amounts to till we 
have felt a personal need of God. Our professions 
about God come of our training; they are the echo 
of other voices. Our convictions about God come 
out of our personal experiences of him; they are 
born of struggles within ourselves. With advanc- 
ing experience there come to us joys and sorrows 
that are intolerable to bear alone ; there come per- 



24 MEDITATIONS ON THE APOSTLES' CREED 

plexities that we cannot face or untangle. In such 
times we recall those dim voices of others' experi- 
ence, and they suggest to us a possible experience 
for ourselves. The doubts and hesitations which 
we had felt and which held us back from a living 
and efficacious faith; those theories that we have 
tried to measure in the balance of a cold and calcu- 
lating reason ; that sense of a judicious calm which 
we have felt when we have said, "Except I see 
signs and wonders, I cannot believe" ; they all dis- 
solve like mist before the fierce heat of our press- 
ing need. The cry is no longer for more light, 
more reason, more evidence, more certain grounds 
for action; but just the cry of our humanity that 
rises out of the need of our throbbing souls, "Sir, 
come down ere my child die." The difficulties of 
belief we know no more, when we throw ourselves 
at the feet of Jesus, eagerly holding out to him our 
extreme need. There is no difficulty of faith to 
the one who feels the need of God. 

So let us pray — 

That we may see our need of God. We have so 
many and such deep needs. Pray that we may not 
be kept from the practise of faith by any super- 
ficial objections of the reason. Pray that we may 
prove the validity of faith by our action upon it. 



I BELIEVE 25 

We beseech thee, O Lord, in thy compassion, to 
increase thy faith in us ; because thou wilt not deny 
the aid of thy loving kindness to those on whom 
thou bestowest a steadfast belief in thee; through 
Jesus Christ, our Lord. 

Give strength, O Lord, to those who seek thee; 
and continually pour into their souls the holy de- 
sire of seeking thee, that at length they may attain 
thee; through Jesus Christ, our Lord. 

• •••••» 

In studying the life of our Lord one of the facts 
that most impresses us is, that in dealing with indi- 
viduals, the thing that he seeks to produce in them 
is a certain attitude toward himself. That attitude 
he calls faith. Perhaps it would be better to say 
that it is an attitude toward God, because those 
with whom he is dealing do not know the secret 
of his divine nature, and consequently he is always 
directing their thought to the Father. Practically, 
their attitude is toward him as the Revealer of the 
Father. He is careful always to make clear that 
what he does for men has some sort of foundation 
in this relation. If he performs a cure, for in- 
stance, there is not simply the objective action of 
the divine will producing changes in the person 
healed; nor is there only the subjective action of 
the man himself working some modification in his 
nervous system; but the will of God and the will 



26 MEDITATIONS ON THE APOSTLES' CREED 

of man seem to meet and become united in the 
effect. Without this cooperation there can be no 
result. Our Lord's own power is limited by the 
absence of the human response. "He could do no 
mighty work there because of their unbelief." 
"Woe unto thee, Chorazin! Woe unto thee, Beth- 
saida ! for if the mighty works that were done in 
you had been done in Tyre and Sidon, they would 
have repented long ago in sackcloth and ashes." 
"O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, thou that killest the 
prophets, and stonest them that are sent unto thee, 
how often would I have gathered thy children to- 
gether, even as a hen gathereth her chickens under 
her wing, and ye would not!" Again He dwells 
on faith as an active factor when, as often, He 
says to those who have been healed, "Thy faith 
hath saved thee." And the importance of it is 
emphasised in such startling sayings as, "If ye have 
faith as a grain of mustard seed, ye shall say unto 
this mountain, Remove hence to yonder place, and 
it shall remove; and nothing shall be impossible 
unto you." 

From other sides of our Lord's teaching it ap- 
pears that this faith goes deeper than mere trust, 
or that response of confidence which would remove 
an antagonistic will ; it is the basis upon which our 
entire relation to God is built up and that which 
renders any relation possible. "And this is the 



I BELIEVE 27 

will of him that sent me, that every one that seeth 
the Son, and believeth on him, may have everlast- 
ing life.''' "He that believeth, and is baptised, shall 
be saved; but he that believeth not, shall be 
damned." 

When we stand up to say our creed, then, we 
are doing much more than giving an intellectual 
assent to certain propositions which we accept as 
true. No doubt we are doing that, too ; we do 
assent to the truth of certain facts, as the Incarna- 
tion, the Crucifixion, the Resurrection. But these 
are facts about a Person, to Whom our relation is 
other than the assent to His existence on a certain 
date and at a certain place. The Creed is not the 
enumeration of certain events, but the explanation 
of a Person ; and in that Person we affirm that we 
believe. It is only of a person that we can say that 
we believe in him. When we say of a human per- 
son that we believe in him, we imply a certain 
trust and confidence in him ; we believe him to be 
possesed of a certain character which we call trust- 
worthy. Because of this character, we are in- 
clined, should occasion demand, to commit our 
property, or even ourselves, to him. 

A true faith in God, then, consists in this atti- 
tude of self-committal. I believe in God when I 
place myself in His hands, to be controlled and 
guided by Him. I believe in God when I subject 



28 MEDITATIONS ON THE APOSTLES'* CREED 

my will to Him, in such wise that His known will 
is always the will of my life. When I say my 
Creed that, and no less than that, is what I am 
professing. But it is not merely a subject-attitude, 
as of one ruled by a will; it is not merely the atti- 
tude of a disciple, who would learn the will of his 
master; it is the attitude of a lover, who devotes 
himself to the service of the object of his love. 
The whole personality is involved in the act of 
faith. 

In our last meditation we analysed the elements 
of personality, and found them to be the self- 
conscious reason, the emotions and the will. We 
saw that each and all of these is involved in each 
personal act, though in varying degrees. Let us 
make a special application of what we have learned, 
and try to see how the elements of personality are 
involved in the act of faith. 

The reason has its place in the act of faith. Its 
function is to interpret to us the object of faith. 
The object of faith must first of all be intel- 
ligible before we can embrace it; but for its 
intelligibility, it is not necessary that we should 
be able to analyse it completely or to under- 
stand all its modes. We do not at all under- 
stand God in His essential being, as He really is. 
But the function of the reason is to show the 



I BELIEVE 29 

rational character of the belief in God; that the 
positive evidences of His being are sufficient upon 
which to found action. That God may be pre- 
sented to us as a rational object of faith, it is only 
necessary to show what is meant by God and not 
the whole content of the term. It is not necessary 
that all the seeming contradictions in the idea of 
God be removed. We are unable to recognise God's 
fore-knowledge, and our own freedom and responsi- 
bility. But such contradictions may be rationally 
held to be due to our limited knowledge of the 
terms of the problem. Reason has only to do with 
the sufficiency of the evidence for the two terms, 
and to recognise the limitation in its knowledge 
which renders their reconcilement impossible. Such 
difficulties are not peculiar to religion; science, 
too, has often to hold two facts that seem to be in 
contradiction, but of which, nevertheless, the evi- 
dence is sufficient to justify us in holding both. 

The reason, then, has for its object to set before 
us in a form as intelligible as possible the content 
of faith. A rational faith is a faith that can state 
its content intelligibly. An irrational faith, on the 
other hand, states its content in terms abhorrent to 
reason. Its statements about God and the acts of 
God are such as contain mental or moral contra- 
dictions. Of the holders of such a faith God says, 
"Thou thoughtest wickedly that I am even such 



3° MEDITATIONS ON THE APOSTLES' CREED 

an one as thyself." That is, such faith attributes 
to God actions and passions which are destructive 
of the very idea of God. Our notion of him thus 
becomes self-destructive. That God foreknows our 
conduct, and yet that we are self-determining and 
responsible, are intelligible statements resting on 
sufficient evidence, though we lack the knowledge 
to harmonise them. We may see dimly the way in 
which the answer lies, but our minds lack the data 
to enable them to think it out. That God predes- 
tines our conduct, and then condemns us for it, is 
destructive of the notion of a moral God. 

So reason analyses the entire data of religion. 
It states what we mean by the facts of the Incar- 
nation, the Atonement, the Real Presence. It 
gives us the content of moral ideas; of goodness, 
righteousness, justice. But having given us the 
meaning of the object of faith, it leaves us there. 
Reason does not compel us, or indeed deeply influ- 
ence us, to embrace the object of faith — to make 
it our own. We might, for all the reason has to 
say, now turn our backs on the whole subject, hav- 
ing satisfied our curiosity about it. 

When the reason has presented us with the ob- 
ject of faith in terms which we can understand 
and without internal contradictions of such a 
nature as to render it rationally impossible for us 
to accept it, our actual appropriation of the object 



I BELIEVE 31 

of faith is the outcome of our emotions. It may 
be that the object of faith is intelligible, but that 
we do not desire it. I believe various statements 
about God, perhaps; that is, my reason assents to 
them; but I only believe in God when I desire 
Him. The desire for God cannot be aroused in 
anyone by mere intellectual appeal. I doubt if 
anyone ever really became religious as the result 
of argument. And I am convinced that much of 
the lack of religion in the world is due, not to 
weight of evidence against it, or to lack of clear- 
ness in its presentation, but simply to lack of 
desire. You know a good many people who are 
not religious because they do not care for such 
objects. 

Our own desire for God is the outcome of the 
contemplation of God as He reveals Himself in the 
completeness of His goodness and love and sym- 
pathy towards us, and a personal appreciation of 
what these things have meant in our own lives. 
One very real cause of the lack of faith in God of 
which we complain is the shallowness of our own 
religious experience and our lack of insight into 
the place that God occupies in our lives. God 
comes into our lives silently, and we perceive Him 
not. We depend upon His care as constantly as 
we depend upon the air for life. But in either case 
we recognise our dependence only by an effort. 



32 MEDITATIONS ON THE APOSTLES CREED 

But to some there comes a time when life reveals 
itself as the act of God ; when the presence of God 
in it becomes the supreme thing ; when God's rela- 
tion to life is perceived to be, not an occasional 
action, but a constant and pervading influence. 
Then it is that we rise from the level of faith that 
accepts facts, to that which commits itself to a 
Person. Now, God is one towards whom we can 
feel emotion, from whom we can expect a re- 
sponse. Prayer which has tended to be a routine 
duty or vague aspiration now becomes a conscious 
communion, the loving relation of person with 
Person. Our confessions become the outpouring 
of the heart at the feet of the God whose love we 
grieve to have wounded, the penitence of the 
child that feels all the waywardness of its sin, and 
all its stupidity. Our absolutions are the evidence 
of the love and sympathy of the Father that re- 
ceives us again to the fulness of His favor. Our 
communions are the times when in a divine inti- 
macy we actualize our relation to our Redeemer 
and dwell in him and he in us. 

There can be no deep faith without such emo- 
tional relation to its object. The intensity of the 
realisation of this relation is greater in some cases 
than in others, but some there must be. We may, 
without emotion, respect and trust a human being, 
but without it we cannot confide ourselves to any- 



I BELIEVE 33 

one with that perfection of self-surrender that is 
love; still less can we confide ourselves to God in 
the act of faith. If I realise what the care of God 
for me means ; what love is implied in His cease- 
less thought for my life ; what of personal intention 
was involved in calling me into existence and 
bringing me into union with himself; my answer 
cannot fail to be that of a self-offering to him 
which is warm with a love that seeks ever nearer 
and deeper intercourse with him. 

It may seem that throughout the act of faith the 
will is passive. But that is very far from being 
the case. Through the whole act of faith the will 
is operative. As soon as we understand the object 
of faith, that is,. God in a certain attitude towards 
man, the will impels us toward him. When God 
is presented to us simply as an hypothesis of the 
intellect, we will to believe in him. And as he 
reveals himself more and more in experience, we 
will with ever increasing power to accept him. It 
is the will that prevents our emotion towards him 
from evaporating in a vague sentiment without 
action. The tendency of emotion is to be satisfied 
with itself, to rest content in the conscious pleasure 
that it creates. The will steps in to prevent this. 
It forces the passive emotion into activity. The 
will urges the intellect to more intense effort to 
understand, and the emotions to more intense ac- 



34 MEDITATIONS ON THE APOSTLES' CREED 

tivity to embrace, the object of faith. Finally, it is 
the will that carries us across the gulf that lies be- 
tween intellectual and emotional appreciation which 
may remain utterly barren to energetic action. 

The state of faith, then, is the state of a thor- 
oughly aroused personality, acting throughout its 
whole extent, regarding its object from every pos- 
sible point of view, and reacting toward its every 
manifestation. Such a faith as that is itself an 
organ of vision. It constantly gets deeper into its 
objects, if I may put it that way, and interprets 
them to itself with increasing clarity. I suppose 
this is because an exercised faith has resulted in 
a relation of sympathy between the believing soul 
and God. Without sympathy our understanding 
of any person is very limited, our understanding 
of God is impossible. But where there is sympa- 
thy, there is instinctive understanding. We do not 
have to reason to our conclusion, we just know 
that it must be so. We know what God approves 
and disapproves because we are so filled with love 
of him that we understand his mind without the 
need to search in books of morals and the like. 
This is that mind that St. Paul speaks of when he 
says, "Let this mind be in you that is in Christ 
Jesus." This is that being taught of God which is 
so complete and satisfying a thing that we need 
not that any man should teach us. This is the ful- 



I BELIEVE 35 

filment of that prophecy that we should all be 
taught of him. One who has such faith feels his 
life touch God all the time. He is conscious of 
such complete harmony with God that he has no> 
fear of misinterpreting the will of God. 

Of course this faith that I have been describing 
I have been describing in its finished state. One 
may be a very good Christian and not yet find 
oneself possessed of this faith in its completeness. 
But if anyone has any faith at all it must corre- 
spond to this description, as far as it goes. It must 
be like it in direction, if not in degree. There is 
not some other faith that is the possession of ordi- 
nary people and serviceable to them. Whoso has 
faith, has this kind of faith, though its degree be 
not as high. They may never have made analysis 
of it to see what it looks like, but if they will do 
so they will find that it looks like the picture I 
have drawn. And whoever not having faith and 
would have it, must seek in it the exercise of all 
the elements of his complex personality. 

The fruit of such a faith is a relation with God 
that nothing can disturb. After God has become 
a reality to me in the experience of my life no 
theoretical attack upon my faith can shake it in 
any degree. I am certain with the certainty of ex- 
perience; and that certainty makes itself evident 
in my conduct. One who possesses faith approaches 



36 MEDITATIONS ON THE APOSTLES' CREED 

the facts of life with a certain self-collectedness 
which is the sign of a confident mastery. Are 
there objections hurled at my reason, philosophies 
and sciences that deny my God? Never mind: I 
cannot answer them perhaps with the demonstra- 
tion of reason, but at least I can say to them, "The 
God whose very existence you deny is my daily 
companion and friend." Do the facts of life press 
hard upon me so that the light seems to fade out 
for me, and sorrow and suffering — my own or 
others — seem the most prevalent fact of life, and 
I cannot see the goodness of God? Never mind; 
goodness is no doubt something greater than I had 
thought it to be. It is so great that it does not 
find it impossible to include pain and sorrow, as 
well as joy and peace. I am content, in any case, 
to trust the God who has trusted me by making 
me his own child and sending me forth to serve 
him. 



THE THIRD MEDITATION 



THE THIRD MEDITATION 

I BELIEVE IN GOD 

Let us listen to the words of God — 
I am that I am. 

Let us picture the scene — 

^|g& OSES is standing in astonishment before 
€ J the Burning Bush. We seem to see him, 
at first, watching his flock that is feed- 
ing in the wilderness. It is a rocky waste, and 
the pasturage is scanty. Moses is looking out \d\y 
over the plain. Perhaps he thinks of his old life 
with his people in Egypt. He remembers their 
slavery. He himself is well away from it. But is 
it well? Ought he not to be with his people,, bear- 

39 



4© MEDITATIONS ON THE APOSTLES' CREED 

ing their burdens and sharing their sufferings? 
We think of him as recalling the promises of God. 
How clear that promise to Abraham sounds : To 
thee and to thy seed will I give this land. It is 
not so much, What has become of the promise, 
as, What has become of God? Why did he not 
fulfil his promise? Why did the centuries flow by 
and God make no sign? And then a Bush before 
him — a common bush — breaks into flame. What 
has set it a-fire? He watches for it to burn up. 
But it burns on, unconsumed. He draws near and 
hears a voice. God has come. 

Consider, first — 

Moses had been in exile many years. He had 
married and settled in the land of Midian. It 
might easily have happened that the thought of 
his people had faded into a pleasant dream. It 
would have seemed so far off, after forty years, 
that life in the House of Bondage, the years of 
favour at the court, the crisis that had preceded 
his flight. Israel's God, the God of his fathers, 
might also have well grown a vague memory. But 
it seems clear that in the silence of the wilderness 
in the profound solitude in which so much of his 
life was passed, the thought of Moses had dwelt 
much on the idea of God. God had become plainer 



I BELIEVE IN GOD 4* 

to him. He was quite different from the grotesque 
idols that covered Egypt. God was eternal, im- 
mortal, invisible. But his power was very evident 
in this wilderness, with its rocks tossed up into 
mountains; in those innumerable stars that stud 
the heavens. Above all, Moses had come to know 
God in the quietness of his own soul. There, in 
his meditations, the Infinite Spirit spake to him. 
It was in the silence of the wilderness that Moses 
came to know God as no one had ever known him 
before. But there had been perhaps no revelation 
like this, when God spake out of the Bush and 
proclaimed himself and Moses' mission. 

Consider, second — 

How much do we know of God? And whence 
do we derive this knowledge? We have the ex- 
terior knowledge that is given by the Creeds; but 
have we more than that? Have we the knowledge 
that comes when God speaks to us face to face as 
a man speaketh to his friend? Such knowledge is 
a voice in the midst of our souls. It comes in 
prayer and meditation and communion. We can- 
not define it for others, but we ourselves are sure 
that God is with us. Our thoughts can detach 
themselves from earth and go to God. We remem- 
ber moments when God has been almost sensible 



42 MEDITATIONS ON THE APOSTLES' CREED 

to us; moments when there was no possible doubt 
of his presence, no mistaking of his will. We 
know in such moments that God is, and that he 
calls us. It is on this that we stay ourselves in 
those long reaches when we are unconscious of 
God. 

So let us pray — 

For intenser vision of God: for the power of 
meditation that will detach us from the earth, and 
open our souls to God. Pray to desire the knowl- 
edge of God. 

Almighty and Everlasting God, Who hast given 
unto us thy servants grace, by the confession of a 
true faith, to acknowledge the glory of the Eternal 
Trinity, and in the power of the Divine Majesty, 
to worship the Unity; we beseech thee to keep us 
ever steadfast in this faith, and evermore defend 
us from all adversities, who livest and reignest, one 
God, world without end. 

Almighty God, whom truly to know is everlast- 
ing life ; grant us so to know the Son Jesus Christ, 
to be the way, the truth and the life, that following 
the steps of thy Holy Apostles, we may steadfastly 
walk in the way that leadeth to eternal life, 
through the same thy Son, Jesus Christ, our Lord. 



I BELIEVE IN GOD 43 

Moses as he stood before the mystery of the 
Burning Bush was to receive a new revelation of 
the will of God for himself and for his people. 
But he was not now for the first time to learn of 
God. He knew God already ; and if one could have 
asked him when and how he came by that belief, 
he would, no doubt have answered, as we would 
answer, that he learned it in his childhood. Sub- 
sequent knowledge, whether gained from the elders 
of his own people, or from "the wisdom of Egypt," 
whether it came through traditional lore, or 
through silent meditation on Arabian plains, was 
but the unfolding, the clearer statement, of the be- 
lief in God which had been his since he could think 
at all. 

Who discovered God? No one, and every one. 
There was no day when a man came to his fellows 
and said, in tones of awe or of rapture, "There is 
a God." The discovery of God was never a great 
scientific or philosophical discovery of the investi- 
gating mind, as the discovery of the law of gravi- 
tation, or of radium. Wherever men were at any 
time, there was the knowledge of God. They knew 
God dimly, no doubt, but with sufficient knowl- 
edge. The knowledge of God is born with the 
human child, for the child lives at all only by the 
Presence of God, and in some dim way is con- 
scious of that Presence. Wherever the child is 



44 MEDITATIONS ON THE APOSTLES CREED 

born, and whatever the language it speaks, it finds 
in its own dependency, in its own need, the clue 
that guides to God. When its mother bids it look 
out at the wondrous world that it is born into 
and tells it of the mysterious power that made this 
world; when she bids it hearken to its conscience 
that it may hear the voice of the unseen Presence 
that guides it; the child understands. That is the 
wonderful thing, that the child responds to the 
thought of God and comprehends it in an effective 
way. It has what one can only describe as a con- 
sciousness of God. When it is taught its first 
prayer, that wonderful act of faith which is the 
speaking out into the silence and the darkness in 
the certainty of being heard, the child needs no 
urging or explanation; its soul answers the call of 
God and speaks to him. We know God because 
God knows us : and there is no darkness of heath- 
enism in which his voice is not heard; no shape so 
grotesque in which the perverted imagination of 
man has conceived him, in which he does not rec- 
ognise the striving of the creature to find him, and 
reward the striving with the vision of himself. 

Innumerable books have been written to prove 
to us by irrefutable logic the existence of God. 
The fact that men go on writing the books, striv- 
ing with ever new ingenuity of argument to bring 
other men to their way of thinking, would seem 



I BELIEVE IN GOD 45 

to show the futility of the books and the unsatis- 
factory nature of the arguments. If the continu- 
ance of man's belief in God had depended on the 
books of the theologians and the philosophers, it 
would have vanished long ago, except perhaps as 
a philosophical doctrine, the cherished possession 
of a chosen few. A religion cannot be supported 
by the sort of means that are used to propagate a 
philosophy. A religion is supported not by sub- 
tility of brains, but by the satisfaction it gives to 
the intimate needs of our nature. It justifies itself 
by finding and satisfying those needs. I do not 
mean that the arguments for the existence of God 
have no force and are of no use. They have both 
force and value ; but not the value usually attached 
to them. Do I believe in God because of the argu- 
ment from causation; because my thought de- 
mands the existence of a great first Cause? Not 
at all. The trained mind of the philosopher may 
demand a first cause, but the plain man feels no 
such need. Do I believe in God because the most 
perfect Being of which I can conceive must have 
necessary existence ? Not at all. I even have con- 
siderable difficulty in getting into my head what 
the argument really means. My belief in God has 
a basis quite different from, and more stable than, 
metaphysical subtilities. I do not wait till I know 
metaphysics to know God. But after I know God 



46 MEDITATIONS ON THE APOSTLES' CREED 

the science and the metaphysics help me to think 
about him; help me to understand the world and 
myself in relation to him. They classify my 
thoughts and brush away my difficulties — the diffi- 
culties, after all, that they themselves have raised 
to perplex me. For such purposes they are good, 
but I did not get my faith from them, nor shall I 
abandon it if they fail me. 

Yes : there is the point that is so often missed 
in our striving to prove to ourselves or others the 
existence of God. Our conviction of God is a faith, 
not a science or a philosophy. It would not be 
very serviceable otherwise. Few are capable of 
science or philosophy; but the veriest child needs 
a faith, cannot by any means get on without one. 
The child, as the philosopher, needs God. And 
God makes himself known to the child — he some- 
times hides himself from the philosopher : or rather 
the philosopher hides himself from God behind the 
mists of human thoughts in which he encloses 
himself. God is the object of faith, and the child's 
faith can reach him, when the philosopher's knowl- 
edge fails. The point about faith is that we do not 
expect to prove its object as we prove the objects 
of merely human knowledge. We know that the 
field of faith and the field of knowledge are not the 
same. They are, as it were, at different levels of 
the human mind. Knowledge comes through our 



I BELIEVE IN GOD 47 

senses and is put in order by our intelligence. 
Faith and hope and love are activities of the human 
spirit which justify themselves by processes other 
than those of science or philosophy. Their objects 
are known immediately by the spirit itself. 

I do not at all mean to imply that the objects of 
faith are uncertain, or indeed less certain, than the 
objects of knowledge. That would not be true. If 
a comparison were possible, I should say that they 
were more certain; i. e., my conviction of them is 
more intense and touches a deeper stratum of my 
personality. What I mean is that the processes 
by which we attain to certainty are quite different 
in the two cases. In knowledge we attain to cer- 
tainty through investigation, argument, proof. We 
decline to assent to what is alleged as fact, if there 
is not a satisfactory degree of evidence for it. But 
faith is the vision of the Spirit that sees its object, 
and in the act of vision knows its truth. It is a 
bond that unites me to the object of my faith, as 
love in a bond that unites me to the object of my 
love. 

This is all very well, you say; but there must be 
some proof, some justification, at any rate, for the 
act of faith, outside the act itself. Yes ; there is a 
justification, and that justification is the effect of 
faith upon life. I do not mean that we are to seek 
for the justification in the differences we may be 



48 MEDITATIONS ON THE APOSTLES' CREED 

able to observe between the lives of those who be- 
lieve and those who do not. There should be, and 
no doubt is, a difference there. But that is not the 
best place to make our observation. It is not easy 
to get at the motives for another's conduct; it is 
almost impossible to get an account of their inner 
life. In the case of the people among whom we 
should naturally conduct our observation, there is 
to be expected close conformity to the moral stand- 
ards of the time and place. No ; the effective place 
to make our observation is in our own lives. We 
have faith in God : what has been the effect of that 
faith in the conduct of our lives? That is a ques- 
tion that we can answer with little fear of mistake. 
And the attempt to answer it at once brings out 
the fact that there is a type of faith that is effect- 
less, and therefore merely nominal. It is really 
not a faith at all, but rather a conventional accept- 
ance of other people's faith. It has no living ex- 
istence in the life. We may put aside this state of 
soul that a rigid self-examination sometimes un- 
masks as not concerning us. But in our own 
experience, what effect has belief in God had? 
Surely it has governed the whole development of 
our lives. If it were not for it we should not be 
calling ourselves Christians. If it were not for it 
we should not have experienced a vocation to the 
religious life; we should not have sacrificed so 



I BELIEVE IN GOD 49 

much of what all men value to the special service 
upon which we have entered. Our belief in God 
has been tremendously significant in the shaping 
of our lives. But that is not quite the whole ques- 
tion. The rest of the question is : Has the effect 
in life justified the belief on which we have acted ? 
Do I find in the priesthood, and you in the religious 
life, evidence of the truth of the belief? Perhaps 
we can get at it better by the question, If I were 
to begin again, would I act in the same way on the 
same belief? Have I experienced such results that 
I find my action fully justified? 

Now, of course, belief in God does not stand or 
fall with the reality of our vocation. Only if the 
vocation be true it gives us a serviceable test to 
apply. But it could perfectly well be that our vo- 
cation were mistaken, and yet the faith itself in no 
wise shaken. The test is good only as a positive 
test; if the experiment is successful, the belief is 
justified. But if the experiment is not successful, 
the belief is not therefore discredited. For there 
are other tests. 

Speaking of life generally, the test is to be sought 
in the development of the spiritual life; the life 
that has conscious relation to God. Has the belief 
been productive in me of the fruits of righteous- 
ness? I can test myself easily enough by the com- 
parison of my life with the Gospel standard : with 



5© MEDITATIONS ON THE APOSTLES' CREED 

the qualities that are embodied by our Lord in the 
Beatitudes, for example, or by St. Paul in the 
fruits of the Spirit. I know well enough whether 
the motives that are implied in these are the mo- 
tives that are dominant in my own life. I put it 
as a matter of motive advisedly, rather than as a 
matter of result. I fancy that we are rather in- 
competent judges of the results; but we are per- 
fectly competent judges of the motives that are 
controlling us. Of the exact place we have arrived 
at in the course Godward we may not be very 
certain ; but the general direction of the movement 
is clear enough. And the direction of the move- 
ment is more important than the rapidity of it. If 
we are moving Godward, under the impulse of the 
Gospel motives, we may conclude that the faith in 
God from which we started is justified by the result. 
There is another application of this test that I 
propose with some hesitancy. Yet where it is suc- 
cessful it is the absolutely convincing test that needs 
no supplement. I hesitate because it is not a 
fatal thing if one cannot stand the application of it. 
What I mean is that in some lives there is a direct 
experience of God, a sense of personal communion 
with him. God speaks and the soul answers : God 
communicates his will and the soul obeys. I believe 
that there may be good Christian lives that have no 
such experience ; that have no conscious commun- 



I BELIEVE IN GOD 5 1 

ion with God. Still, in most, if not in all, cases of 
that kind, I am inclined to think that the trouble is, 
not that God is not present to the life, but that 
the life has not learned to recognize him when he 
manifests himself, and therefore interprets his 
manifestation as something other than it really is. 
God calls, and the child Samuel runs to Eli, be- 
cause he does not yet know the word of the Lord. 
It is only later, after instruction, that he lies still 
and says, " Speak, Lord, for thy servant heareth." 
God's voice sounds, and we have habituated our- 
selves to think of it as simply the emotional reac- 
tion of prayers or sacraments. We interpret it as 
the natural prompting that comes through our con- 
science. We say to ourselves : I was simply ex- 
cited, I was nervously overwrought. We put the 
experience down to the account of the imagination. 
In reality it was the Present God. Such states, if 
we will understand them, are states of deep spirit- 
ual experience, ladders set up from heaven to earth, 
if only we knew how to climb. 

But with others there is neither doubt nor hesi- 
tation. We know that God is here and speaks. 
We move in the consciousness of his presence, we 
are thrilled with the sense of his nearness, we are 
able to speak to him fully and frankly as to a friend. 
The consciousness of his presence gives my prayer 
its vitality; I speak eagerly as to one I but just 



52 MEDITATIONS ON THE APOSTLES' CREED 

miss seeing. Or it may be that the sense of the 
presence hushes me into silence. I just open the 
doors of my soul and my God enters in. To most 
of us, I imagine, this vivid sense of God is not 
given often, but when it is given there is no mistak- 
ing its reality. If I have known it only once, I 
know, as a personal experience, that God is ; I find 
my belief in him justified. There is no need of 
further evidence. I turn over laboured pages of 
argument to prove the existence of God. But it is 
waste time for me : I know. 

But there come moments of relaxation and hesi- 
tation. Do I know? Might there not be some 
simple physiological or psychological explanation of 
my experience, I ask myself. And I answer, Yes, 
if that experience stood alone; but it does not. It 
is, can we not say, an universal Christian experi- 
ence ; in all ages and places of the Christian Church 
this is the thing that men have testified to as the 
ultimate justification of their faith. The voice of 
the Saints is unanimous in this testimony. They 
say plainly and simply that they have found God 
to be a reality in their spiritual experience. They 
have not known of him solely through the testi- 
mony of others, or as an inference of the reason, 
or a postulate of philosophy, but they have known 
him in the intimacy of spiritual communion. And 
more than that: It is not merely a Christian ex- 



I BELIEVE IN GOD 53 

perience, it is a race experience. The united voice 
of humanity raises its unswerving testimony that it 
has known God. After all, though there are many 
religions, there is only one God : and however men 
may have named him, and by whatever rites they 
may have worshipped him, he has been the same. 
He was not the God of the Jews only, but of the 
Gentiles also; and it was the same God who w T as 
ignorantly worshipped at pagan altars, whom the 
Apostle made known. And the God who in his 
infinite mercy sought us and died for us when we 
were yet sinners — are we not to believe that he 
seeks all men also, and that he manifests himself 
everywhere that men seek him honestly, under 
whatever name? Their testimony, who shall re- 
ject, when they say that they, too, have experienced 
God? This race experience of a personal God 
touching human life is the irrefragible testimony to 
the reality of God. No argument can detach us 
from the God of experience. 

Belief in God, then, is securely founded. It re- 
mains that we question ourselves as to its hold on 
our lives. No doubt the moods of intimate com- 
munion are transient, but their effects ought to be 
permanent. 

The first effect that one would look for would be 
the conscious reference of the life to God in all its 
details. This will show itself in the decline of wil- 



54 MEDITATIONS ON THE APOSTLES' CREED 

fulness, of self-assertion, of anxiety. That is, the 
presence of God is experienced as a calming power. 
Disturbance can come into my life only through my 
self-assertion, through my setting up an independ- 
ent will. I am conscious, when I examine myself, 
of an immense amount of restlessness, of fretting 
against the circumstances and limitations of my 
life. There are days of rebellion; there are mo- 
ments of passionate resistance ; there are times of 
dull, passive indifference. Now the point about 
these is that one is always conscious, though one 
does not always want to acknowledge it, that they 
proceed wholly from one's own wilful self. They 
need not be. One is just letting oneself down to 
a plane where one need not be, and has no right to 
be. And more important still, one is deliberately 
shutting God out. One knows, at the back of one's 
mind, that if one would just go back to God, and 
put oneself in his hands, all would be at peace. 
The thing that we are in rebellion against might 
not, very likely would not, be removed; but the 
effect of it would be quite other. It is good in 
such moments to repeat to oneself slowly and 
thoughtfully, I believe in God. It is wonderful how 
very small our worries become in the light of that 
belief: how often they vanish altogether before the 
name of God, as the mists vanish before the com- 
ing of the sun. We cannot be wilful or petty with 



I BELIEVE IN GOD 55 

the sense of the divine presence upon us. You 
have seen the child, restless and peevish, stilled 
just by the perception of the calm eye of the older 
friend upon it. It is so with our fretfulness when 
we become conscious of the eye of God. 

And the "I believe in God" is not only a source 
of calm, but it is a source of strength. Our work 
grows wearisome, and much of the weariness is 
that we have to do it alone. You know how work 
is made easier and lighter if only some one we care 
for will come and sit by us while we do it. We are 
doing the same work, but somehow we are at the 
same time sharing it. It is quite possible to bring 
God in to take this sort of share in our work. The 
one great support we find in the weariness of life 
is the sympathy of God. We are always so sure 
of that. Nobody else may care, but we are sure 
that God cares. Others may criticise the way in 
which we do our work, or the work after it is 
done ; we know that God is sympathising with the 
effort to do it. He sees and understands what 
others will not — the faltering will, the tired muscles, 
the aching nerves. One falters on as best one may, 
and one almost sees the smile in the eyes of God. 

One might go on quite indefinitely — belief in God 
is such a wonderful thing, so effective in life. But 
I will stop here with only one further word: and 
that shall be of the stimulating power of our faith. 



56 MEDITATIONS ON THE APOSTLES' CREED 

There is so little we can do for God, we think. 
Rather, there is so much ; the trouble is to find time 
for it all. There is so much; for somehow one 
fancies God caring a good deal for the little minis- 
tries of life. Lives of tremendous effectiveness are 
few. A life of careful service — anyone can give 
that. You remember when our Lord wanted to 
particularise a service acceptable to God, he did 
not instance martyrdom, but an act of almost trivial 
nature — the cup of cold water. It is significant, is 
it not? You are impatient sometimes, are you not, 
of the detail of the rule ? Perhaps it seems to shut 
out the greater thing that you might do. But are 
we sure of our measures? Perhaps if we can get 
a willingness and love into the little thing, it will 
measure larger than we thought and not miss its 
reward. 



THE FOURTH MEDITATION 



THE FOURTH MEDITATION 

THE FATHER ALMIGHTY 

Let us listen to the words of the Prophet — 

W%/OUBTLESS thou art our Father, though 

%T / Abraham be ignorant of us, and Israel ac- 

acknowledge us not: thou O Lord, art our 

Father: our Redeemer; from everlasting is the 

Name. 

Let us picture — 

Israel in Exile. "By the waters of Babylon we 
sat down and wept, when we remembered thee, O 
Sion." It is many years now since Jerusalem had 
fallen. Her walls are broken down, her palaces are 
desolate, her temple is a charred ruin. But the eye 
of the exile sees not the ruins, but the fair beauty 

59 



60 MEDITATIONS ON THE APOSTLES' CREED 

of the city which was the joy of the whole earth. 
To his partial mind Babylon is as nothing; he has 
no admiration for these stupendous palaces and 
temples. His thoughts go ever back across the 
weary wastes of sand which separate him from the 
land of his love to rest on the city chosen of God 
and precious, which now lies desolate and outcast. 
Why should it be? Would it be forever? These 
were the questions that were ever before his mind. 
He could not believe that it would be forever : how- 
ever much Israel may have sinned God could not 
have cast them off forever. But as the years went 
by there was an aching doubt — perhaps forever. 
Among the exiles there is one man, at least, that 
will admit no doubt. He is a man in close com- 
munion with God ; he interprets to his brethren the 
mind of God. He believes in no final abandonment 
of Israel because he believes that God is Israel's 
Father. "Doubtless thou art our Father." He is 
a Father to be relied on even when the love and 
intercession of Abraham fail. 

Let us consider, first — 

The inner life of Israel depended on its fidelity 
to the election God had made of it to be his Son. 
Whatever God might be to other nations, he had 
revealed himself to Israel as a Father. The voca- 



THE FATHER ALMIGHTY 6 1 

tion of the nation was the vocation of adoption: 
"Out of Egypt have I called my Son." Recall all 
that had meant in the history of Israel, all of tender 
care and watchfulness. But more than that: It 
formed the basis of appeal to God. Israel might, 
if it would, at any time claim the rights of a Son; 
that it had not the wisdom to do so, was its weak- 
ness and disaster. As a whole, the nation had 
despised its vocation ; therefore it was here in exile, 
lamenting too late its failure to understand the 
thought of God for it. Lamenting, yet not alto- 
gether despairing; for the promises were so splen- 
did, the love of God in the past so evident, his 
patient forgiveness so often experienced, that the 
present darkness was lightened by some gleams of 
hope. The prophets were sure that Israel was not 
cast off forever. They felt that God's Fatherhood 
was too deep and significant a thing, and Israel's 
Sonship too closely bound up in the plans of God 
for the future of humanity, to be altogether de- 
stroyed by the faithlessness of the nation. They 
could look on the present as a punishment by which 
the Son was being disciplined for his future career. 

Let us consider, second — 

We have a clearer knowledge of how much was 
implied in God's revelation of his Fatherhood to 



62 MEDITATIONS ON THE APOSTLES' CREED 

Israel We understand how right the Prophets 
were in feeling that this relation was an indestruct- 
ible one. We can see deeper than they consciously 
could. We can see the method by which God was 
planning to bring his wanderers home; the Divine 
Son, taking flesh of Israel, and through that flesh 
making it possible that all men might become the 
Sons of God. The Fatherhood of God means to 
us at least a potential relation of God to the whole 
race. For ourselves it means an actual thing that 
has taken place, an experience through which we 
have passed. It means also, as it meant to the 
Prophet, a promise on which we can rely. God 
will not cast us off; and if we ourselves cut our- 
selves off, God waits for our return. We can at 
any moment cry, with a certainty of being heard, 
"Doubtless thou art our Father." 

And so let us pray — 

For the will to realise ourselves as the Sons of 
God. Let us pray for the vision of the Father. 

Lord, our God, great, eternal, wonderful in 
glory, who keepest covenant and promises for those 
who love thee with their whole heart ; Who art the 
life of all, and the help of those who flee unto thee, 
the hope of those who cry unto thee ; cleanse us 
from our sins, secret and open, and from every 



THE FATHER ALMIGHTY 63 

thought displeasing to thy goodness, that we may 
always know thee, our Father and our God. 

I believe in God the Father. It reminds us in 
the first place of our Blessed Lord ; for the Father- 
hood of God in which we profess to believe in the 
Creed is not God's relation to us, but his relation 
to his Son. What the Creed means to teach us is 
not now about ourselves, but about the blessed 
Trinity. What God is in himself we can know but 
dimly, and then only so far as he reveals himself 
to us. By searching we can find out little of God. 
In the Holy Scriptures God reveals himself to us 
as Triune — "I believe in One God in Trinity and 
Trinity in Unity." That is, we believe that there 
is one divine nature, and that in the unity of that 
Nature there is a trifold distinction of persons, 
Father, Son, and Holy Ghost. 

What the relations are between these three Per- 
sons can only be conveyed to us under some sort 
of imagery, because there is nothing really like 
them on earth. What God himself has chosen to 
picture to us, this relation is the human relation 
between father and son. We are, of course, not 
intended to carry out the analogy into all the par- 
ticulars of that relationship. What we are to fix 
our minds on, I suppose, is in the first place, the 
fact of a derived nature. The Father alone is the 



64 MEDITATIONS ON THE APOSTLES' CREED 

source and origin of being — he is God of himself 
and not of another. The Father has Life in him- 
self : He has given to the Son to have life in him- 
self. That is what we mean by the eternal genera- 
tion of the Son. That eternal generation is not an 
act that took place and thereby constituted the Son 
to be Son, something that he had not been before ; 
but it is an ever subsisting relation between the 
Father and the Son, such that the Father has always 
been Father and the Son always Son. This relation 
is eternal as God is eternal. Therein the human 
analogy fails ; for the human father transmits his 
nature to his son once for all in a single act; the 
generation of the Divine Son is an eternal relation 
between the first and second Persons of the Blessed 
Trinity. 

The second point that is suggested by the anal- 
ogy is that the relation between the Father and the 
Son is one of love. The fact of love is one of the 
facts that, apart from the testimony of the Scrip- 
tures and the Church, would lead us to believe in 
the Trinity. It is impossible for us to think of God 
as being alone. God is love ; and love must always 
be shared. We can think of the Onliness of God: 
that there is none like or equal to him : we cannot 
think of the Loneliness of God : that he is solitary. 
If God exists as love, he exists as loving, and we 
can only think of a loving Person. Father, Son 



THE FATHER ALMIGHTY 65 

and Holy Spirit, loving one another is conceivable : 
a bare unity shuts out the idea of love altogether. 

But although when we call God Father in the 
Creed, we mean the Father of the Son, that does 
not mean that we have exhausted the meaning of 
the term. "Beloved, now are we the sons of God," 
says St. John, and we were taught long ago in our 
catechism that by baptism we were made the chil- 
dren of God. This childhood of which we are pos- 
sessed, flows directly from the fact of the sonship 
enunciated in the Creed. We are the children of 
God because we participate in the divine Sonship 
of our Lord. 

It is, perhaps, just as well to point out that this 
is not the same thing as that "Fatherhood of God" 
which is the favourite creed in certain quarters to- 
day. We might think from the intensity of some 
utterances that the Fatherhood of God and the 
brotherhood of man is quite all that is of any im- 
portance in religion — the wheat left after the winds 
of criticism have blown away the chaff of theologi- 
cal verbiage. But the matter is not quite so simple 
as that : it is necessary to draw certain distinctions 
in regard to this famous Fatherhood of God of the 
liberal theologians. I have never found it conduc- 
tive to truth or clearness to confound two things 
that are really distinct. 

Now it is most blessedly true that God is the 



66 MEDITATIONS ON THE APOSTLES' CREED 

Creator and Preserver of all things. God's love 
and care for all his creatures is one of the funda- 
mental postulates of all religion. It is not true that 
God has a special class of favourites — the elect — 
and that all the rest of mankind lie under the dis- 
favour of God. That is Calvinism, not Christianity : 
and it is in the reaction from Calvinism that the 
liberal doctrine of the Fatherhood of God has 
played so great a part, and gained so great a popu- 
larity. One's objection to it is rather an objection 
to its form and to its intention. God loves and 
cares for all men, but it only confuses matters to 
call that relation by the name of Fatherhood, which 
has a special sense of its own. The Fatherhood of 
God, as it concerns us, is a special relation, conse- 
quent upon our incorporation into the Body of 
Christ. Our Lord is the Only-Begotten Son of 
God : and we, by our baptism, are made members 
of him, and therefore and thereby become the chil- 
dren of the Heavenly Father. This relation is due 
to the impartation of the nature of Christ to us, 
and it is a bond of a closer nature than that which 
results from our creation. We are now in covenant 
with God, and are entitled, in virtue of that cove- 
nant, to the fulfilment of certain promises of God, 
conditional upon our fulfilment of the terms of our 
side of the covenant. Our relation is no longer the 



THE FATHER ALMIGHTY 67 

undefined relation of a creature, but the specific 
relation of a child. 

It is precisely these promises of God made in the 
covenant of baptism, that constitute the privileges 
of the Christian. These privileges are, in the first 
place, the grace of Baptism itself. The person bap- 
tised is regenerate and made a new creature. I 
feel sometimes that what one would think would 
be our constant thankfulness and wonder at the 
gift of baptism, is somewhat deadened by the fact 
of its distance. It is well for us to recall sometimes 
just what befell us then. The baptised person is 
taken out of the natural and placed in the supernat- 
ural order. A new gift is conferred — that of eternal 
life. Eternal life is not just a synonym of immor- 
tality. Our Lord did not come to make men im- 
mortal : they were immortal already by the fact of 
their creation. But he says that he came that we 
might have life. This is explained to us when St. 
Peter says that "we are made partakers of the Di- 
vine Nature." That Divine and Ineffable Nature 
that became joined to our humanity in the Incarna- 
tion of the Second Person of the Blessed Trinity, 
is, through our union with that Incarnate nature in 
our baptism, transmitted to us, so that being one 
with Christ, we are made the children of God. 

It throws something of glory about our common 
humanity when we think of it as taken up into the 



68 

Divine. It were a great thing to think of myself 
as the object of God's love and care: but to think 
of myself as his child, as the partaker of his nature, 
that is a thought that puts my life, its actions and 
its destiny, in quite another light. The child of 
God, even while plunged in the midst of common 
things, must conceive himself as, in some sense, 
separate from them : at any rate he moves among 
them as one whose ultimate destiny lies elsewhere, 
and who is using this world as the instrument of 
his development, not as the end of his being. The 
child of God cannot have common thoughts about 
common things. Even the common things are the 
revealers of the Divine presence, and means of the 
Divine action. We must all of us feel something 
of that urgency of vocation that possessed our 
Lord when he said to his Blessed Mother, "Wist 
ye not that I must be about my Father's business?" 
"About the things of my Father!" The things of 
my Father : that is how this world appears to us. 
Things oftentimes twisted, and warped, and di- 
vorced from their proper use, but still the things 
of the Father, to be rescued and restored to his 
service in so far as that is possible for us. There 
is a sense of special vocation upon the child of 
God, the sense of a pressing obligation to show the 
Father. We watch the actions and the words of 
the child to see therefrom what the mind and will 



THE FATHER ALMIGHTY 69 

of the Father is. That is our vocation. Have you 
ever thought of yourselves as the revealers of God ? 
That the character of God is made known to the 
world by the character of you, his children? We 
take up the work of Christ in that regard. The 
world is never convinced of the truth of religion 
by references to past facts : when it is convinced, 
it is by the facts that it can see. It does not so 
much care about seeing Christ in the Bible, as it 
does about seeing Christ in Christians. What can 
Christ do for life now? is its perfectly natural and 
legitimate question: and the only effective answer, 
is the answer, Look at the lives of Christians and 
see. The weakness of Christianity at any time is 
the inadequacy of that answer. 

We shrink — it is natural that we should — from 
the application of such a test as that. But can 
there be any other test? In any case, shrink as we 
may, the world insists upon its application. It in- 
sists that we shall show it what the power of the 
Christ-life is : and if we fail to show that it has 
any power over us, it declines to pursue the inves- 
tigation any farther. 

This effect of our daily lives, I imagine, is one 
of the things that we are least careful to examine 
ourselves about. Has the day involved sin, breach 
of the rules, and the like — so runs the daily exami- 
nation. Has the day witnessed to the character of 



70 MEDITATIONS ON THE APOSTLES' CREED 

God — do we ask that? Your lives here in this 
school — how profoundly significant they are in the 
course of years to the hundreds of girls that pass 
through here. What is the thought of God that 
your influence leaves? What is the impression of 
the religious life that they take away with them? 
Is it an impression of love, joy, peace, patience, 
kindliness? I wonder. Are they attracted to the 
religious life? 

We are the children of God: that implies the 
permanent relation of our lives to God. Nay, more 
than that : it implies the permanent presence of 
God in our lives. That presence is a purifying 
presence. When God came into our lives at our 
baptism, one result was the forgiveness of sins — 
our lives were cleaned : and if God is to stay there 
they must be kept clean. That we are the children 
of God is the basis of the confidence with which 
we return to him when we feel that we have sinned. 
Yet, after hearing many confessions, I feel that 
there is a missing note in them. The note of con- 
trition is there — often it rises to a note of exceed- 
ing pain. Much too often there is a note of dis- 
couragement. But the note of love is rarely there. 
Yet the coming back to one's Father, with what- 
ever shame and contrition, is fundamentally an act 
of love, is it not? We come, not because we fear, 
but because we love our Father. We come back 



THE FATHER ALMIGHTY 7 I 

as his children to one who we know loves all his 
children, however erring. If we did not love, and 
were not sure of the Father's love, should we come 
at all? That lies back of all the theory of confes- 
sion : but is it often present in its practise ? There 
ought to be joy then, the joy of the child that finds 
itself safe once more in the Father's arms. Some- 
thing of the routine feeling that necessarily goes 
with habitual confession might be eliminated if 
more of the sense of God as our refuge could go 
into it. 

In practise we often lose sight of what is in- 
volved in the fact of being the children of God, in 
that it includes certain promises. There is a feel- 
ing that, I suppose, is at bottom humility, that pre- 
vents us from claiming the promises of God. That 
God has made promises we know, but we shrink 
from making any claims on the basis of them. That 
would appear to be, at any rate, an unscriptural 
attitude. The Prophets, for example, are constant 
and untiring in reminding God of his promises. 
His honor is bound up in the fate of Israel. If the 
chosen nation suffers disaster the heathen will be 
in a position that they will not be slow to avail 
themselves of — they will mock Israel for its reli- 
ance on the promises of God, and mock God as 
unable to fulfil his promises. The same attitude is 
commended by our Blessed Lord to his disciples, 



72 MEDITATIONS ON THE APOSTLES' CREED 

"Seek and ye shall find : ask and ye shall receive : 
knock and it shall be opened unto you." And God, 
in a strange parable, is compared to the unfriendly 
neighbour who is forced to rise by the importunity 
of the seeker for help. The kingdom of heaven 
suffereth violence and the violent take it by force. 
Energetic desire is always commended to us as the 
attitude toward God that attains its end. 

Do we shrink from this violence in our prayers? 
Do we shrink from making demands on God ? We 
ought not, for God wishes us to do so. Our lives 
need more of boldness in our demands upon God. 
Boldness is the mark of intense earnestness, is the 
measure of what we really care. 

God has given us the right to approach him at 
any time. The doors of heaven are always open: 
the ear of God is always attent unto our prayers. 
Why should we not storm heaven with our prayers, 
if we are convinced of the rightfulness of them — 
of the reality of our need. Why come into the 
presence of the Father with timid shrinking, when 
he has promised that he that cometh to him shall 
in no wise be cast out? The prayers of Christen- 
dom are so weak, so heartless, so inexpectant, — 
that is why they are so ineffectual. There is in us 
so little of spiritual energy ! Would that we could 
pray as God wants us to pray, with an insistence 
that will not be refused. 



THE FATHER ALMIGHTY 73 

It is the right of the child to be protected by its 
Father. That should eliminate the element of fear 
from our lives. The secret of the boldness of the 
saints is the fulness of their reliance on the Father. 
"Though I walk through the valley of the shadow 
of death, I will fear no evil, for thou art with me," 
— that is their attitude. When men noted the bold- 
ness of Peter and John, they found the secret of 
it in the fact that they had been with Jesus. If we 
have a real experience of God, we shall be bold to 
go on wherever he calls us to go, and do whatever 
he tells us to do. 

Those who are at the threshold of the religious 
life, one can imagine, will look often into the future 
with somewhat of trembling. Shall I be able to 
endure? When the life really closes about me, 
shall I not find it a horrible and unendurable mo- 
notony? Will I not fail in capacity of self-control 
and self-adjustment? Will I be able to keep my- 
self in charity and obedience? No, certainly not, 
so long as the attitude is shall I be able to keep 
myself. But you have the right to demand that 
your Father shall keep you, and there can be no 
doubt that he will answer all demands made on 
him. If you fail, it will be because you fail to rely 
on God; because in the dark hour of temptation 
you rely on self, and do not lay yourself in the 
everlasting arms. No vocation ever failed that 



74 MEDITATIONS ON THE APOSTLES' CREED 

conceived itself, first of all, as a vocation to God. 
Vocations fail when we lapse to mere notion of 
rule keeping, and let the personality of ourselves 
and others become vastly important; when we fret 
ourselves with our failure, rather than joyfully 
betake ourselves to the eternal love. There is no 
failure to one whose life is hid with Christ in God. 
As long as the life is in God, its failures are the 
failures of God, and God's failures, must we not 
believe, are in the end successes. The world of 
God so often seems, from our limited point of 
view, is a tremendous failure; but our point of 
view is illusion: the reality, when we see it, will 
justify itself. Wisdom is justified of all her chil- 
dren. 

This relation to our heavenly Father is an eternal 
relation. The grave has no influence upon it. 
Death only brings us nearer God. We, if we have 
lived our lives as obedient children, look forward 
in hope and confidence to what lies on the other 
side of death. What does lie there is hidden from 
us in detail, but in its broad outline it is plain 
enough. 

We shall be in a state of greater privileges and 
without hindrances. Though we grow here as we 
develop power of resistance through temptation, 
yet we cannot suppose that temptation is itself nec- 
essary to growth. The removal of temptation and 



THE FATHER ALMIGHTY 75 

sin should mean a rapid spiritual expansion. We 
can hardly judge of the capacity of a spiritual be- 
ing by what it succeeds in accomplishing under the 
hindrances of our present state. Our possibilities 
are doubtless far beyond what we can even imagine. 
"Now are we the sons of God, and it does not yet 
appear what we shall be." They are wonderfully 
suggestive words — these of St. John. They seem 
to raise a corner of the veil that hangs between us 
and the future, and suggest infinite possibilities for 
us there. How much is involved in, "We shall be 
like him" ; what wonderful growth in spiritual per- 
fection. 

Whatever be involved in the process of freeing 
our nature from the stains and imperfections of 
this life, which must be a part of the immediate 
future of the child of God when he enters the new 
mansion of his father, we cannot think of it as 
being other than a process full of joy. We shall 
have the certainty of our salvation and the nearer 
presence of our Lord. One pictures to oneself the 
exceeding joy with which one makes up the things 
that are lacking, the eagerness with which we ac- 
complish our work. For we work with the pros- 
pect of seeing the Father, and in the wonder of 
that vision we shall at last be satisfied. 



THE FIFTH MEDITATION 



THE FIFTH MEDITATION 

MAKER OF HEAVEN AND EARTH 
Let us listen to the Word of God — 



Z 



HE Morning Stars sang together, and all 
the Sons of God shouted for joy. 



Let us picture — 

A beautiful afternoon, let us say, by the side of 
the lake. It is an afternoon in spring, and is warm 
out there in the sunlight. There is just enough 
breeze to ripple the surface of the lake; in the 
upper reaches of the air, a stronger wind sends the 
clouds flying before it. Watch the shadows of the 
clouds as they sweep over the surface of the water, 
how the colour tones alter from moment to moment. 

79 



80 MEDITATIONS ON THE APOSTLES' CREED 

There, where a moment ago it was a shimmering 
sheet of intense blue, the water has changed to deep 
purple. See how the deep green nestles in the little 
curves of the wavelets. There, a deep shadow 
seems to throw out a hand and snatch the light off 
the ripples; here, the light gains the victory, and 
chases the shadows before it with gay laughter. 
See how the depth of the water is marked by the 
changing intensity of colour. It is a fast shifting, 
gleaming, sparkling floor of amethyst and emerald. 

Consider, first — 

God made this lake, with its ever-changing 
beauty. This is but one of the infinite marvels of 
his creation. God made that in us that we call the 
sense of beauty that we might be able to perceive 
the beauty of the creation and that our hearts 
might be gladdened by it. This beauty of the 
creature — may we not think of it as the beauty of 
God shining through his works? How beautiful 
God must be if the mere reflection of him shining 
through his works is so resplendent? The glory 
of God! Have we ever thought much of that, as, 
in part at least, the glory that we see in the uni- 
verse — the glory of the sun, and of the moon, and 
of the stars? The glory of the heaven reflected in 
still waters, the glory of the tender green of spring- 



MAKER OF HEAVEN AND EARTH 8 1 

ing leaves, the glory of the myriad-colored flowers ? 
How the Psalmist felt that; how the beauty of the 
world throbs through the Psalms. 'The heavens 
declare the glory of God, and the firmament show- 
eth his handiwork." "Thou deckest thyself with 
light as it were with a garment ; and spreadest out 
the heavens like a curtain, Who layest the beams 
of his chambers in the waters : and maketh the 
clouds his chariot, and walketh upon the wings of 
the wind." 

Consider, second — 

That the revelation of God that comes to us 
through the natural world is a very real one. There 
is no doubt a dark side to the message that it 
brings, but we need not think of that now. What- 
ever the darkness it does not destroy the light. It 
is true, is it not, that the beauty of the world 
brings God very near to us? Think how your 
heart has been lightened and gladdened by it : how, 
perchance, some wave of gloom or despondency has 
been lifted by the beauty of the world. We see 
the power of God in the earthquake and the tem- 
pest ; but we see the love of God in the flowers that 
clothe the meadows and in the light of sunset skies. 
We see the immutability of God in the laws that 
guide the universe; but we read the character of 
that will — that it wills our good — in the fruits of 



$2 MEDITATIONS ON THE APOSTLES' CREED 

the ground that we gather into our garners, and 
in the herb that he giveth for the use of man. We 
are so apt to think of God as aloof from us, even 
when we think of his loving kindness ; but one 
seems to find a passionate eagerness in God as one 
looks at the splendour of his bounty, the abundance 
of his provision for our good. There is enough in 
nature to assure us that God is love, though there 
be something there that we cannot reconcile with 
this belief. 

So let us pray — 

To see God more in his world : to reverence the 
creature as the means of making God known to us. 
Let us adore God in all his works. 

O Gracious Father who openest thy hand and 
fillest all things living with plenteousness : We be- 
seech thee of thine infinite goodness to hear us, 
who now make our prayers and supplications unto 
thee. Remember not our sins, but thy promises of 
mercy. Vouchsafe to bless the lands and multiply 
the harvests of the world. Let thy breath go forth 
that it may renew the face of the earth. Show thy 
loving kindness that our land may yield her in- 
crease ; and so fill us with good things that the poor 
and needy may give thanks unto thy name ; through 
Jesus Christ, our Lord. 



MAKER OF HEAVEN AND EARTH 83 

As we look out upon the visible creation there is 
a mingling of light and shadow there. There are 
moments in which it seems to us a very dreary 
world; pain and struggle seem its dominant notes. 
Whatever of joy there is in it is transitory. Its 
sunshine is quenched in clouds ; its flowers wither ; 
its living beings are the prey of disease and death ; 
the shadow of its mortality stretches black across 
it. But if we think a moment we shall feel that 
the picture may as well be reversed. The sunshine 
follows the cloud, if we will look at it in that way. 
If the flowers die, at any rate they bloomed and 
were a vivid joy while they lasted. And if there 
is death there is also life — life with implications 
and possibilities that death cannot touch. If there 
is transitoriness, it is death that is transitory : life 
is abiding and eternal. 

Blots on the creation, we speak about ; death and 
sorrow a huge blot, we think. But there is another 
side to that if we look for it. We are willing 
enough to accept life even conditioned as it is with 
suffering. Take the commonest instance of the 
hardness that we are wont to complain of — the 
death of one we love ; we suffer in that death : we 
count it as one of the great mysteries that we 
should be thus called on to suffer. In the pain of 
it we are sometimes driven to question the justice 
of God. But instead of vexing ourselves with 



84 MEDITATIONS ON THE APOSTLES'' CREED 

questions that we cannot solve, let us rather ask 
ourselves, why we suffer? What does the capacity 
to suffer in the death of another imply? We suf- 
fer, do we not, because we love? It is the great 
gift of love that makes the suffering possible. If 
we did not love we should not suffer. Let us im- 
agine that we had a choice in life : that there were 
offered to us life that should be without suffering, 
but that the price that we must pay for it should 
be that it be without love : or, that we could have 
our present human life with love, and suffering as 
its shadow. Is there any manner of doubt which 
life we should choose? When we have buried the 
one that we have loved, and the pain of the loss is 
at its intensest, would we ever accept an offer that 
the pain should be blotted out of our lives, if only 
we would consent that the memory of the past 
should go too? Such suggestions are intolerable. 
What we love, we are willing to suffer for. It was 
because God so loved the world that he was will- 
ing to die for it. 

And admitting the mystery of evil, of pain, of 
loss — the mystery that we cannot fathom — still the 
world is not the evil place that the pessimist assures 
us that it is. Much that we find objectionable, we 
ourselves put there. In a very wide and real sense 
we construct our own world. The world that we 
actually live in, is a world that is the product of 



MAKER OF HEAVEN AND EARTH 85 

our own temperament ; the clouds that lie across the 
landscape are our own shadows : the lights that 
sparkle on its field are the lights of our own joys. 
We know perfectly well how that is in the case of 
others. We know the effect — the cold douche as 
we call it — of the presence of a gloomy, complain- 
ing person. A depressed person is depressing : but 
equally a bright, light-hearted person lights up a 
cloudy day. 

And probably this obvious truth has a wider 
reach than we are apt to suppose. Most of the 
gloom and hardness that we read into the material 
world is not really there : they are emanations from 
us. We exaggerate and misinterpret the phenom- 
ena of life, by relating them to ourselves : by im- 
agining how we should feel under the like circum- 
stances. I have always been struck, in reading the 
novels of Miss Austen, with the amount of pity 
that is there bestowed on people who are so poor 
as to be able to keep only a man and two maids. 
I never was able to excite much pity in myself for 
those in that lamentable situation. But it is a point 
of view ; and quite possibly our feeling of the suf- 
fering that there is in nature and in human life, 
mis-estimates the suffering that is really there. 

What I want to bring out is that much of the 
modern thought about the world is thoroughly 
pessimistic and unhealthy. I believe that it is so 



S6 MEDITATIONS ON THE APOSTLES' CREED 

because the modern mind that interprets the world 
to us is itself morbid. It has got into the habit of 
looking at the world apart from God. To look at 
the world apart from God, has precisely the same 
effect as looking at life apart from love — it changes 
all the values, and leaves us all the sadness without 
the compensation. Men to-day have got to look- 
ing at the world as a uniform system governed by 
fixed laws. That is the necessary way of looking 
at it for purposes of scientific description ; but it is 
not the only way in which it may be looked at: it 
is not a moral or religious way. Religion looks at 
this same world from the point of view of its de- 
pendence — it is the creature of God: not a creature 
that God made and left to itself, but a scene in 
which God is eternally present. What science calls 
laws, religion calls the immediate acts of God. 
Both are right for their own purposes : but the 
purposes are different. Religion has nothing to do 
with uniform laws governing the universe : it has 
to do with a present God guiding his creatures : a 
God not apart from, but in his creatures all the 
time. Science tells, from its point of view, of the 
laws of the living organism that govern its life, its 
growth, its death : religion knows that not a spar- 
row falls without our Father. There is no contra- 
diction here : each view is true. But each views 
the facts from a different standpoint. It is true, 



MAKER OF HEAVEN AND EARTH 87 

no doubt, that the present universe has been 
evolved in the course of ages by the action of force 
on matter, and that the procession of life upon it 
has been that that is described by the doctrine of 
evolution. That is the scientific description. But 
it is also true that in the beginning God created the 
heavens and the earth : that he made the world and 
all that therein is. That is the religious descrip- 
tion. Science can deal only with material phenom- 
ena : religion deals with spiritual realities. The 
danger is in supposing that the scientific descrip- 
tion of the world is the only true description, and 
being thereby led to a morbid and pessimistic view 
of the creation. 

But once we have grasped the religious descrip- 
tion of the world as the product of a divine pur- 
pose and the sphere of a divine action we are able 
to take a brighter view of it: we get back to the 
Biblical view. The Bible, we remember, is not 
science, but religion, and it is the religious view of 
the creation that we find there. There we find God 
rejoicing in his work. We feel the throb of the 
divine joy all through the Old Testament. There 
is a naive simplicity in the Old Testament present- 
ment of God. He glories, quite frankly, in his 
works. We feel a certain pleasure that he takes 
in the great whales that he has made, and in Levi- 
than: a certain excitement in the storm when he 



88 MEDITATIONS ON THE APOSTLES' CREED 

comes flying upon the wings of the wind. A crude 
anthropomorphism — it is easy to sneer. Yes : an- 
thropomorphism ; and why not? Can we under- 
stand God otherwise than in the terms of our own 
nature. No one, I take it, ever got any living, en- 
ergetic notion of God from scientific and meta- 
physical definitions of him. Whatever vital notion 
of God we get, we get when he is defined for us in 
the terms of our own nature. Metaphysics says 
that God is without body, parts, or passions : but 
the Bible, which is not metaphysics, but religion, 
says that he loves and hates. That is a statement 
that at any rate we understand. And we are not 
likely to misunderstand it : we are not at all likely 
to make the inference that God is a magnified man, 
notwithstanding all that is said by the fearers of 
anthropomorphism : the inference that we do actu- 
ally make is that what God is said to hate should 
be hateful to us, and what God is said to love 
should be loved by us. 

The inference that we make from the religious 
description of God's attitude toward the world is 
that our attitude toward it should be, not a morbid 
depreciation of it, but a frank joy in it, and pleas- 
urable and temperate use of it. It is God's bounty 
towards us that we are to receive with thankful- 
ness, and use with reverence. 



MAKER OF HEAVEN AND EARTH 06 

And first of all we are to find in it — that is the 
Biblical point of view — the Divine Presence. God 
is in the world and the world reveals his presence. 
We need to get rid of the prejudice of our educa- 
tion which was in terms of the scientific description 
of the world, and put ourselves back at the point 
of view of the religious description of it. The 
causes we learned about were scientific formulae: 
religion knows only one cause — God. The work 
that is done upon earth, he doeth it himself. He is 
the reality of the phenomenal world; consequently 
he is not far from any one of us — "Closer to us 
than breathing, nearer than hands or feet." The 
presence of God in the world is not the effect of 
his action or the working of his power, but the 
Personal Presence of the Divine Father. 

We can rest in that presence in perfect confi- 
dence and peace. The phenomena of the world 
are just the veils that are hung before the presence 
of God. 

From above us and from under, 
In the ocean and the thunder, 
Thou preludest to the wonder 

Of the Paradise to be : 
For a moment we may guess Thee 
From Thy creatures that confess Thee 
When the morn and evening bless Thee, 

And Thy smile is on the sea. 



9° MEDITATIONS ON THE APOSTLES' CREED 

Then from something seen or heard, 
Whether forests softly stirred, 
Or the speaking of a word, 
Or the singing of a bird, 
Cares and sorrows cease : 
For a moment on the soul 
Falls the rest that maketh whole, 
Falls the endless peace. 

O the hush from earth's annoys ! 
O the heaven, O the joys 
Such as priest and singing-boys 
Cannot sing or say ! 
There is no more pain and crying, 
There is no more death and dying, 
As for sorrow and for sighing, 
These shall flee away. 

What a difference it makes in the world if we 
look out upon it as just the veil that separates — 
that does not really separate — from God. I never 
get out of the Divine presence: I am never away 
from the Divine help. I have no sense of distance 
when I think of God. "God's in his heaven, all's 
right with the world." No: that is not the truth. 
God's in his world, and therefore all's right with 
it. "Thou art with me" — that is the fact. "Thou 
art about my path and about my bed and spiest 
out all my ways." It is the thought of the presence 
of God that gives our prayers their vitality, is it 
not? I am the "child crying in the night," no 
doubt: but not with terror, for I am certain that 



MAKER OF HEAVEN AND EARTH 9 1 

my voice is heard. I go about my daily duty and 
I can stop at any time and talk with God. I can 
face my temptations calmly, because I know that 
I have only to reach out my hand and it rests in 
the hand of God. The inexplicable thing about 
human life is that it should ever be weak when 
there is this inexhaustible strength to lean on. 

How is it that with this certainty in our lives we 
insist on living so much alone? One would think 
that loneliness would be impossible for us : that all 
our life would be consciously rested on God : that 
I would so surrender my life to God that God 
would act for me and in me. The life of discipline 
means that, does it not? — a surrendered life, a life 
consciously controlled by God? I am powerless 
apart from God, but with him I can do all things. 
The consecrated life means that, does it not? — a 
life that is so united to God that it has come to 
see the divine purpose, and devotes itself to the 
accomplishment of it ? The devout life means that, 
does it not? — a life that feels itself in the divine 
presence, and kneels at God's feet, and draws all 
its inspiration from him. 

Life and the things of life, I said a moment ago, 
are God's bounty to us : we may use them freely. 
It is a view of the world that religious persons 
have found it easy to lose sight of. There early 
stole into Christian thought from poisoned sources 



92 MEDITATIONS ON THE APOSTLES' CREED 

a view of the world that made it antagonistic to 
God. Eastern speculation has always been haunted 
by a feeling of the evil of matter : it thought of 
spirit as something not only separate from but as 
antagonistic to matter. It was unable to think of 
God as in contact with the material world which 
seemed to it to be the seat of all evil. It dreaded 
and hated the body as a material thing. Christian 
thinking was deeply infected with this view : it 
came to have almost the same dread of matter and 
distrust of the body that Eastern speculation had. 
It exaggerated the sinfulness of sins that were 
specially seated in the flesh. It felt that abuse of 
the body was the way of escape from the material. 
The consequence of all this was a false asceti- 
cism : a discipline of the bodily nature whose pas- 
sions, disordered by sin, need to be brought back 
into subjection to the will of God. But any theory 
of the evil of the body ignores the fact of its crea- 
tion by God, and of its possibilities in his service. 
The body is good, and all its natural passions are 
good : it is only their disorder that is evil. It is the 
duty of the Christian to reverence the body, to 
maintain it in health and purity. A body that is 
wilfully disordered or weakened is an unfit servant 
of its creator: it is incapable of the best service 
that God has the right to expect from it. The 
mediaeval abuse of the body defeated its own ends 



MAKER OF HEAVEN AND EARTH 93 

and created the very morbidity that it hoped to 
overcome. 

The heaven and the earth that God created and 
sustains are to us a source of the knowledge of 
God. The Bible never argues about God as mod- 
ern works on the evidences of religion do : but it 
constantly points us to the visible world as itself 
the evidence of the existence and character of God. 
I am not proposing to enter into any evidential 
argument, but there are one or two points that I 
wish to bring out in the evidence of the creature 
to the Creator. 

And I would lay especial stress on the beauty of 
the world as revealing its Creator. The sense of 
the beautiful is inherent in our nature. We are 
unable to explain just what it is or to get any com- 
plete analysis of it, but it exists in some degree in 
every man. Who knows why it is that our souls 
are stirred so deeply by the sight of fields bathed 
in the golden light of the morning? Who knows 
why a rose or a lily is a living joy? There are 
sounds that stir in us depths of emotion that noth- 
ing else will reach. There are lines of poetry that 
find an entrance to our souls by some path before 
untrodden. The beauty ot the creation finds in us 
something that is akin to it and which under- 
stands it. 

But the beauty that is in the creation — what is 



94 MEDITATIONS ON THE APOSTLES'' CREED 

it but God made visible? God is the supreme 
beauty and his work reflects him. It is because we 
are like God, that we are made in his image, that 
we have a spiritual nature, that we are able to 
perceive a reflection of God in his works. Again, 
if you will, we are interpreting God by what we 
ourselves are. But again, too, that is perfectly 
legitimate, for the creature has a certain likeness 
to its creator : any understanding we may have of 
God must come to us through our likeness to him. 
We do well to cultivate this sense of the beauti- 
ful, for it is by so doing that we are fitting our- 
selves for the enjoyment of God. It is very nota- 
ble that heaven is described to us in terms of 
beauty, rather than as we might have expected 
that it would be, in terms of morality or activity. 
It was the music of heaven that caught the ear of 
St. John, and the gleam of its gold and jewels that 
held his eye. These are symbols, no doubt : but 
the significant thing is that the fact of heaven can 
best be conveyed under imagery of beauty 7 , just as 
it is significant that the moments of our greatest 
spiritual exaltation, when we feel nearest to God, 
are most often mediated through beauty of form 
or sound. One is more likely to feel oneself 
brought into the presence of God, and to be stirred 
to the adoration of him, and to be stimulated to 
his service, before the crimson of a sunset or the 



MAKER OF HEAVEN AND EARTH 95 

note of an organ, than by our spoken exhortation. 
We mistake utterly if we take such states of exalted 
feeling as of no significance. They are really states 
of revelation wherein God speaks to us and wherein 
we, if we listen, are made certain of the Presence 
of God. 

"A garden is a lovesome thing, God wot ! 
Rose plot, 
Fringed pool, 
Ferned grot — 
The veriest school 
Of peace : and yet the fool 
Contends that God is not — 
Not God ! in gardens ! when the eve is cool." 

There is another aspect of the creation that im- 
presses one in a quite different manner with the 
presence of God in his work. I mean the order 
that is visible in the world. Order is the evidence 
of intelligence : an orderly world is a world gov- 
erned by intelligence. If we were dealing with the 
evidences for the existence of God from an apolo- 
getic point of view we should insist on this order 
as of supreme importance. And it is of import- 
ance, too, from our present point of view of the 
interpretation of God as the object of our worship. 

For what we feel that we need to find in God, 
if we are to worship him, is a person: that is to say, 
a Being with whom we can have the kind of rela- 



g6 MEDITATIONS ON THE APOSTLES' CREED 

tion that we call personal. If by God we meant a 
force, or an influence, or a cause, we should feel 
that while we might be subject to him, none of the 
intimate relations of love or sympathy or service 
would be possible. They are only possible in rela- 
tion to a person. We can obey a force but we 
cannot love it : we can be controlled by an influ- 
ence but we cannot expect sympathy from it. Now 
what is essential to our notion of personality is 
intelligence : if the cause of the world displays in- 
telligence, we are sure of the possibility of a per- 
sonal relation. 

And it is the order of the world that assures us 
that its cause is personal. By order, I mean that 
the world can be understood : that we can foresee 
its action and reckon on its permanency. The con- 
ception of nature that science has formulated as 
uniform, and governed by fixed law is another way 
of stating this. If nature were governed by chance, 
we could not count on the permanency of any- 
thing : we should have no ground of expectancy of 
the sunrise to-morrow, or of finding the stars in 
their orbits night after night. 

But nature is orderly, and the power that has 
created it is therefore intelligent. We count on 
the permanency of the natural laws, and we may 
likewise count on the permanency of God's rela- 
tion to us. He loves us with an everlasting love. 



MAKER OF HEAVEN AND EARTH 97 

"The everlasting God, the Lord, the Creator of 
the ends of the earth, fainteth not, neither is 
weary." "With him is no variableness, neither 
shadow of turning." Morning by morning as we 
turn our thoughts to him, he is the same: "his 
mercies fail not." Evening by evening as we come 
to him saddened by the failures of the day, his 
pardoning love meets us. In him is the ever-pres- 
ent possibility of renewed strength and joy. Life 
of our life, strength of our strength; he is con- 
stant, though we be inconstant. We may lean on 
him as heavily as we will: "underneath are the 
everlasting arms." 



THE SIXTH MEDITATION 



THE SIXTH MEDITATION 

AND IN JESUS 

Let us listen to the words of the Angel — ■ 

HOU shalt call his name JESUS, for he 



Z 



shall save his people from their sins. 



Let us picture — 

The scene in the stable at Bethlehem on the first 
Christmas morning. There are two peasants here, 
and a new-born child: a very simple scene. But 
the writer of the Gospel has sketched the picture 
in a few bold strokes with such realism that it 
would be one of the imperishable stories of the 
world even though the interests involved were less 
tremendous. We have only to shut our eyes to 
see it again. The inn with its noisy crowd where 

IOI 



102 MEDITATIONS ON THE APOSTLES' CREED 

there is no room for the latest comers : the sordid- 
ness of the stable, yet, perhaps not uncomfortable 
to those who had known so little of comfort in 
their lives : the birth of the child and his laying in 
the manger : and in contrast with this, the world 
outside. The shepherds abiding in the fields, 
startled by the shining of the heavenly light and 
the rush of angelic voices through the star-strewn 
midnight. The veil between heaven and earth 
seems drawn aside for the moment, and the two 
worlds touch visibly, as they always do invisibly. 
Over in the East there are star-led Magi journey- 
ing to find a new-born King. In the background, 
Herod, symbol of a hostile world, ready to secure 
his position by the murder of the child that lies 
unconscious in the manger. And then the wonder 
that the child whom shepherds visit, and Magi 
seek, and Herod fears, and Angels worship — this 
peaceful, sleeping Child — is the mighty God, the 
Eternal Father, the Prince of Peace, the Saviour 
of the world. Great is the mystery of Godliness. 

Consider, first — 

That the purpose of God in the creation is reach- 
ing a further and a decisive stage in the birth of 
this Child. That birth is not an accident, due to 
sin, but a part of the eternal purpose of God in 



AND IN JESUS IV> 

the creation. God made man in order that man 
might know and love God. This purpose might be 
momentarily defeated by sin, but it could not be 
permanently frustrated. That God and man should 
become one through an Incarnation of God was 
the divine purpose in the creation. The conditions 
under which the Incarnation took place, no doubt, 
were determined by sin: that it should be thus 
humble-wise and in circumstances of poverty and 
pain, and that man's redemption should cost the 
death of his Redeemer. So behold God here, 
emptied of his glory, folding the robe of humanity 
about him and becoming the child of Mary. Let 
us adore the love of God in the Incarnation, the 
love that does not shrink from entering into human 
misery, and sharing the lowest place with his crea- 
tures : the love of God that will seek and save even 
in the farthest wilderness and among the loneliest 
mountains, the lost sheep of humanity. Let us 
look with clear eyes upon this manger and the 
Child lying there, and make our act of faith in him, 
acknowledging him our Lord and our God : God, of 
the substance of the Father, begotten before the 
worlds: and Man, of the substance of his Mother, 
born in the world. Perfect God, and perfect Man : 
of a reasonable soul and human flesh subsisting. 



io 4 MEDITATIONS ON THE APOSTLES' CREED 

Consider, second — 

That the birth of this Child has changed the 
world for us: through it new possibilities are 
opened for us. It is not simply that he brought a 
new truth, a new revelation of the will of the 
Father : but that he brought a new life of which we 
have been made partakers. His stooping was our 
rising. We have been taken into the incarnate 
nature of this Child and made partakers of his 
divine nature. It is not, then, an interesting his- 
tory that we are studying but a personal relation 
that we are trying to understand. My salvation is 
in this Child. I am saved or lost as I abide in him 
or am separate from him. My personal interest in 
Bethlehem is, therefore, intense. It is not only 
that I approach with awe the Incarnate God, but 
that I approach with passionate love my Saviour. 
I see in him the greatest revolutionary force that 
the world has ever known : a force that overturns 
empires and changes the face of civilizations : I 
see also the power that has altered my own life, 
has chosen me to be a Christian, has determined 
my vocation and brought me to this place. I see 
the God who has wonderfully intervened in behalf 
of humanity: I see — and when I see, my heart 
swells with gratitude — the Saviour who has washed 
me from my sin in his own Blood, and who, I 



AND IN JESUS 105 

trust, will sustain my weakness to the end, and 
finally receive me to himself in his eternal and 
everlasting glory. 

So let us pray — 

That our faith in this Child may never fail us. 
That we may ever be able to count him as our 
Saviour — our JESUS. 

Almighty God, who hast given us thy only- 
begotten Son to take our nature upon him, and to 
be born of a pure virgin : Grant that we being re- 
generate, and made thy children by adoption and 
grace, may daily be renewed by thy Holy Spirit: 
through the same our Lord Jesus Christ, who liv- 
eth and reigneth with thee and the same Spirit 
ever, one God, world without end. 

Merciful and loving God, by whose will and 
bounty Jesus Christ our Lord humbled himself for 
this — that he might exalt the whole race of man: 
and descended to the depths for the purpose of 
lifting up the lowly : and was born, God-Man, by 
the Virgin for this cause — that he might restore 
in man the lost celestial image : grant that thy peo- 
ple may cleave unto thee, that as thou hast re- 
deemed them by thy bounty, they may ever please 
thee by devoted service. Through the same Jesus 
Christ, our Lord. 



106 MEDITATIONS OX THE APOSTLES' CR^CJ 

In the heart of Christianity is not a great idea, 
but a loving person. When philosophic thought 
has done its utmost, it leaves us with a notion of 
God that is distant and perplexing: or, if it takes 
the road of pantheism, is indefinite and illusive. 
We are crushed beneath the conception of tre- 
mendous power, a power that knows no pity, nor 
sympathy : or we lose ourselves in the hopeless 
vast of an all-embracing life which neither knows 
nor can be known. It is the Christian religion 
that rescues us from this intellectual and spiritual 
desolation, and reveals God to us as a person. It 
makes God known to us as one who has clothed 
himself in our nature that he might share in our 
experience and reveal to us the manner of human 
life that is pleasing to him. I emerge from my 
struggle to grasp the abstract idea "God," to find 
myself confronted with the concrete fact, "God 
Incarnate" : I come down from the mountain of 
intellectual contemplation and sit at the feet of 
Jesus and there learn what God is like, not in the 
purity of the divine essence, but what he is like 
for me in the revelation of his will for humanity. 
I am content with this limited view of God. When 
Jesus says, "I and my Father are one," I am con- 
tent with the knowledge of the Father that is 
implied in the life of Jesus. I am content to rest 
on his love and his sympathy. The thought of 



AND IN JESUS 107 

God striving to better human life: strengthening 
it in its trials, feeling for its disasters, forgiving 
its iniquities, healing its infirmities and guiding its 
aspiration and endeavours, is the thought of God 
that I find helpful in life and adequate to life's 
needs. I do not deny anything that the philoso- 
phers and theologians tell me about God "in him- 
self" : but practically I am content with "the light 
of the knowledge of the glory of God in the fact 
of Jesus Christ." 

My needs are met by the revelation that is en- 
folded in his human Name — Jesus : for whatever 
other things are dim to me, I am quite certain that 
I need a Saviour. I am quite sure that my nat- 
ural life is weak and sin-defiled; I am quite cer- 
tain that of itself it can never rise to be a life that 
can satisfy any divine ideal of what a human life 
ought to be, for it is quite impossible for it to sat- 
isfy my own low human ideal. Jesus' revelation 
of himself as Saviour, therefore, is a revelation of 
hope and joy. It defines God's attitude toward me 
as one of seeking and hoping love. God has never 
despaired of me, however I may at times have 
been tempted to despair of myself. God has ex- 
pectations of me, and makes demands upon me. I 
am content and glad that that should be so, because 
those hopes and demands ensure God's personal 
interest in me, and when I study them I find that 



108 MEDITATIONS ON THE APOSTLES* CREED 

God does not expect me to do anything alone, but 
the meaning of Jesus is that he will save : that he 
will so work with me and in me that the result 
will be that I shall be able to realize God's hopes 
for me, and justify his interest in me, and by his 
love and favor attain to salvation. 

This is remote — astonishingly remote — from 
much that one finds expressed in modern thought 
on the relation of God to man. Modern thought 
wants to know what God is "in himself" : it is not 
at all content to know what, in Jesus, he has re- 
vealed himself to be. Modern thought revolts be- 
fore all at the thought that man needs salvation, 
at the implication of sin. We have been told that 
there is nothing that the modern man is less 
troubled about than the thought of his sin. Mod- 
ern thought about sin is dominated by the evolu- 
tionary philosophy of the universe. The universe 
is a process of becoming and in that process there 
are many incidental defects : but as the process 
advances the defects will be overcome. It is so in 
the evolution of the human race. In our uprise 
from the lower animals, much of the animal nature 
still clings to us. As individuals and as society we 
are doubtless imperfect. Let us acknowledge the 
imperfection and strive to correct it: but let us 
recognize it as imperfection and not reproach it as 
sin. Let us strive, by all means, to better our- 



AND IN JESUS Io9 

selves: but we shall more hopefully do this by 
action than by penitence. Salvation will come 
through truer knowledge and sincerer action. 

With much of which one may well agree — but 
with reservations. One has to point out that while 
the universe may be progressing toward perfec- 
tion, it may be, and often is, the fate of the indi- 
vidual or species to deteriorate and perish. The 
path of progress is strewn with wrecks. These are 
the unfit, that were unable to correspond with the 
demands that life made upon them. And when 
you concentrate attention upon human progress, 
the phenomena of unfitness and loss become por- 
tentous. They too, these degraded and perishing 
human beings, were unable to meet the demands 
that life made upon them. But was their inability 
of the essence of the matter, or was it because of 
the lack of something that might have been sup- 
plied? Was it due simply to outside pressure, or 
was it due to ignorance and self-will? Might not 
a different attitude toward life have resulted in a 
different fate in life? 

There can be no doubt that the last statement is 
in accord with the facts. Whether the human be- 
ing rises or falls in character — to leave other 
things out of account — depends upon his con- 
formity with that which is right — a right that he 
knows or may know. We all agree that lack of 



HO MEDITATIONS ON THE APOSTLES CMEED 

conformity with right has disastrous results : we 
Christians call the moral disaster that ensues when 
one refuses to conform one's life to the demands 
of right, not misfortune or imperfection, but sin. 
It is sin to disregard, with open eyes, what we 
know to be right. It is sin, because we are not 
compelled to our action by the blind operation of 
evolutionary forces, but we choose our action be- 
cause we want it. 

It is possible that the winnowing process of 
evolution might in the end produce a higher type 
of average life than we at present see. But God 
has not left us to this slow process, because among 
other things, the individual who may fall by the 
wayside is important to him. He desires not that 
any should perish. It is God's care for the indi- 
vidual that explains his saving action upon the in- 
dividual that the evolutionary process disregards. 
Our Lord comes bringing salvation, and we may 
look upon this coming of salvation as a supple- 
mentary effort of God. The process of human his- 
tory continues to unfold itself: there is the same 
struggle with the same temptations. There is the 
same possibility of open-eyed violation of law and 
of consequent moral disaster. But the human case 
has become more hopeful through the introduction 
of new factors. Henceforth there lies within the 
reach of each one the means of counteracting the 



AND IN JESUS III 

effects of deficient knowledge and imperfect will- 
ing. God unites his strength to the strength of 
man. God is not compulsive will directing from 
the outside: he is efficient co-operation within our 
nature. 

Salvation does not mean an arbitrary act on the 
part of God. The salvation that is in Christ is 
open to every one, but is attainable only on condi- 
tion of appropriate action. There is no favouritism 
with God. That is a thoroughly false view of the 
Christian religion that assumes that because salva- 
tion is the free gift of God we have nothing to do 
in the attainment of it. Jesus saves those who are 
interested in their salvation. He will save the 
whole race, if the race will interest themselves in 
the appropriation of his work. 

For salvation is the result of the identification 
of ourselves with Christ and his work. This identi- 
fication has as its result the improvement of life — 
what we call righteousness. The roses that deck 
our gardens are the result of the co-operation of 
the gardener with nature. Nature by herself would 
never have produced those gorgeous blooms: 
neither would the gardener. There is no likeli- 
hood that the forces of "nature" would, by any 
however extended process of evolutions, have pro- 
duced the flowers of sanctity on the natural growth 
of unregenerate nature. But the Divine Gardener 



112 MEDITATIONS ON THE APOSTLES' CREED 

produces them when he grafts the wild growth 
into himself. He confers on it powers and gives 
it to guidance which ''by nature it could not have." 
But what he produces is a real change in human 
nature. God does not, by some sort of pious fiction, 
for the sake of the life and death of his Son, con- 
sent to regard sinners as though they were not 
sinners — he does not cover them with the cloak of 
his own righteousness : but he confers upon them 
the grace whereby they may themselves become 
actually righteous. Our salvation, therefore, is 
not the arbitrary act of God, removing us from the 
number of those whom he counts sinners and re- 
ceiving us as righteous because of our acceptance 
of Christ : rather our acceptance of Christ and 
incorporation in him has the result of removing us 
from the number of sinners so that we become 
righteous in a real sense of the term. 

The essential thing, therefore, to use theological 
language, is that we should pass from a state of 
nature into a state of grace : that we should pass 
from a state of separation from God to one of 
union with him. This distinction, we are some- 
times told, implies a wrong conception of God and 
of his relation to his creatures. But I think not, if 
we will be at pains to understand what it means. 
However we may account for it, sin is a fact. 
Without religion we are, as a matter of fact, sep- 



AND IN JESUS 113 

arate from God: and there is nothing in modern 
knowledge to prevent us from regarding this as an 
hereditary fact. It is the function of religion to 
bring us back to God. What people are inclined 
to resent in this presentation of religion is the sup- 
posed implication that, because we are sinners and 
largely without fault of our own, we are hateful 
to God. One would have supposed that the most 
superficial study of Christianity would have silenced 
that objection. Where in Christianity is God pre- 
sented as hating mankind? He is presented as 
hating sin : but his hatred of sin is just because of 
the disastrous effect of sin on man. His whole 
revealed work is inspired by love of man — that 
love that finds its ultimate manifestations in the 
life and death of Jesus. If God had hated man 
he would have left him in his sin: but instead, 
God submits to the shame and death of the Cross 
out of love for his creature. 

I am not now going to discuss what limitation 
in the power or will of God is implied in the method 
by which he has chosen to bring salvation. I am 
concerned simply with the fact of the salvation 
itself: that it was provided through the Incarna- 
tion of the Son of God. I want to fix your thought 
on the human side rather than on the divine side, 
and to look at the fact of salvation in some of its 
less obvious aspects. 



114 MEDITATIONS ON THE APOSTLES' CREED 

Our Lord, in bringing us salvation, made God 
known to us. But we had known God before? 
Certainly. The Old Testament, in particular, had 
told us much about God. But the Old Testament 
made God known rather in promise than in fulfil- 
ment. We are apt to lose the preparatory charac- 
ter of the Old Testament. If you will try to think 
of the revelation of God as closing with the book 
of Malachi you will at once see that in that case 
there would have been no expansion of the Jewish 
religion, and we should long ago have thrown away 
the volume as the record of preposterous promises 
and unrealised dreams. We only believe the Old 
Testament because the revelation of God did not 
close with it, but went on to fulfil the promises and 
to actualise the dreams. We are right, therefore, 
in saying that our Lord made God known: made 
him known as the Fulfiller of his promise. I feel 
that we may sum the revelation up by saying that 
it was a revelation of God as interested in human 
life, and through that interest he revealed human 
life as a life of infinite possibilities of advance 
because he showed that it was capable of union with 
himself. We may say, therefore, that the revela- 
tion of God to man involved a revelation of man to 
himself. Man, no doubt, believed in himself as a 
creature of eternal destiny. He assumed his own 
immortality, and that therefore his importance was 



AND IN JESUS 115 

a more than earthly importance. But he had not 
understood his possible relation to God, and his 
capacity for union with God. In the light of that 
capacity I become quite a different creature in* my 
own eyes. My future is illumined. It is no longer 
a future of dim and scarcely human existence in a 
shadowy Sheol, or of idle and joyous wanderings 
in Elysian fields, but a future of the enjoyment of 
God himself made possible through his participation 
in my nature. 

But it is a future that I must realize through my 
own activities. My relation to God must imply a 
growth in me. It is not that God possesses me, or 
that I possess God ; but that I possess God in so far 
as I cultivate the divine life imparted to me. It is 
not a promise that one day I shall see God, or be 
like God, or even be in God : but that I am present 
now in God, and that the permanency or the transi- 
toriness of this union depends upon the way in 
which I use my life in relation to God. The salva- 
tion is an actual fact ; that is, I have been incorpor- 
ated in Christ : the sanctification upon which de- 
pends the permanency of the union is a potential 
fact whose realisation depends upon my conduct. 

It remains, therefore, that we consider some of 
the signs by which we may estimate the perma- 
nency of the state of salvation in which we have 
been placed. 



Il6 MEDITATIONS ON THE APOSTLES' CREED 

I take it that one of the signs to be looked for is 
the extent of our interest in our "eternal life." 
Eternal life is a present possession. If we are 
"saved" and "in Christ," we are in a relation to 
God that is enduring, if we will have it so. The 
point is, How much are we interested in this rela- 
tion and the activities that flow from it ? It is obvi- 
ous that a relation to God cannot be fruitless : it 
must result in certain activities. Those activities 
are what we call spiritual activities and must result 
in the deepening of our appreciation of spiritual 
things. Our outlook becomes broader than this 
world. We are intimately concerned in the devel- 
opment of what I may call the stable qualities ; that 
is, the qualities that will survive death and persist 
in the coming life. There are certain qualities that 
obviously have reference to this life. I am not 
saying that they are without value, but only that 
they are temporary. I am not saying that we ought 
not to cultivate them, but only that we ought to 
cultivate something else. The ideal of the good man 
upon which so much stress is laid to-day, is an 
admirable ideal as far as it goes, but it needs sup- 
plementing by the ideal of the righteous man. The 
ideal of the righteous man contains all that the ideal 
of the good man contains, and much more. The 
good man performs his duty towards his neighbour : 



AND IN JESUS Il7 

the righteous man does that ; but he also performs 
his duty towards God. 

The righteous man looks forward to the state be- 
yond death with interest. He has not simply a 
vague belief or hope that in some sense he will sur- 
vive death ; he is certain of survival : and in his 
coming state he expects that certain of his powers 
will be freed and enlarged. His power of knowl- 
edge, for instance, will have a tremendously in- 
creased scope. His power of love will find itself 
unfettered. What he knows now as the love of our 
Lord — how intense that will be when he is brought 
into his very presence. The joy of friendship — 
how that will be increased when we are permitted 
to choose our friends among the company of heaven. 
Prayer, which to so many of us is a difficult disci- 
pline, will become an active and joyous communion 
with God. 

There is a certain quality of the human mind that 
is called the constructive imagination. It has 
proved itself immensely useful in the progress of 
knowledge. The man of science uses it continually. 
On the basis of the, often meager, data at his dis- 
posal, he constructs an hypothesis which will ex- 
plain some department of experience that is as yet 
unexplained. He then proceeds to act as though his 
hypothesis were true : he applies it to the explana- 
tion of the department of experience that he is 



lib MEDITATIONS ON THE APOSTLES CREED 

studying. If it turns out that the hypothesis works 
when so applied, that it actually explains what he 
imagined that it would, he has added to the sum of 
human knowledge. This is the almost invariable 
process by which advance in knowledge is achieved. 
Such postulates as the law of gravitation, and the 
doctrine of evolution are the outcome of the appli- 
cation of the constructive imagination. The poet 
creates a character in much the same way, and when 
he has created it, we say that it is convincing: that 
is, it is justified by human experience. 

There is constant need of this quality in the relig- 
ious life. It is the constructive imagination, start- 
ing from the facts of revelation, that builds up the 
hypotheses of faith. We trust ourselves to them 
and we find them justified in life. We know that 
the life that assumes that spiritual activity will be 
justified by its results does indeed find that to be 
the fact. It does find that such activity leads to 
the knowledge and the love of God. We come to 
know God in experience only after we have assumed 
that he can be known and have acted in the appro- 
priate way. But one who waits to have it demon- 
strated that the Christian may have intimate com- 
munion with the living Jesus, and declines to act 
without the demonstration, will never reach the 
dreamed of end. We pass through experiment to 
experience. But the experience when once it is 



AND IN JESUS II9 

attained, is a personal experience and cannot be 
shared. Each must attain the experience for him- 
self. 

It is thus that the experience of salvation is at- 
tained. Jesus has saved us. He saved mankind : 
yes, we assent to that as a datum of religion. But 
has he saved me? I can, of course, say to myself 
I have the external marks of salvation. I believe 
and have been baptised. I am in the communion 
of the Catholic Church. But we really are unsatis- 
fied with the external evidence : we crave subjective 
assurance. And that is won by experiment, by con- 
fiding our lives to Jesus, by throwing on him the 
burden of our cares and sufferings, by laying at his 
feet our joys and aspirations, by sharing our hopes 
and fears with him in our prayers. Out of that 
experiment there does come a personal knowledge 
of Jesus and a personal communion with him. 
After he has answered our prayers, and borne our 
sorrows, and made himself manifest in our com- 
munions, we have passed to a state of inner per- 
sonal certainty. We have experienced the joy that 
no man taketh from us. Salvation has now come to 
mean to us infinitely more than the fact of safety. 
It has come to mean a state of life in which we are 
in intimate communion with Jesus, and in which we 
find the fruitage of the spiritual qualities which we 
distrusted because we never committed ourselves to 
them. 



120 MEDITATIONS ON THE APOSTLES CREED 

It is not true to say, as some have said, that this 
appreciation of the salvation that is in Jesus has a 
disastrous reaction upon this life. It has often been 
charged that concentration on the spiritual interests 
of life tends to withdraw us from the performance 
of its more immediate and practical duties. Chris- 
tians who have attained to the spiritual communion 
are given to underrating the life that now is. I do 
not believe that that is true. The duties of life re- 
main to them duties : indeed they come to them with 
a new appreciation. The duties of our earthly life 
are the sphere of our service of Jesus. They are 
not things imposed by society, but they are a part 
of our vocation. It is among them that Jesus has 
called us ; he has placed us there that he might find 
us there. We have not gone to heaven to find him, 
but he has come to this world to find us. All the 
duties of our present life, however commonplace 
they may be, are duties to him. 

When we have gained a personal experience of 
Jesus as our Saviour, the wish of our hearts will be 
for deeper and more constant communion with him. 
Our acts of worship will gain in fervency as they 
are realized as means of approach to him, and 
through him to the Father. The Eucharist, in par- 
ticular, becomes dear to us, not now from the wide 
point of view, in that by our participation in it we 
are enabled to join ourselves to the sacrifice of our 



AND IN JESUS 121 

Lord, and offer ourselves in him to the Father. But 
by it we are enabled to put our lives within his sac- 
rifice, and feel that there they have become a part of 
his ceaseless offering for mankind. 

But it is above all in our communions that we find 
Jesus. Through them he comes into our souls to 
dwell in them. There are cold souls that stand 
without and question — "How can this man give us 
his flesh to eat " But there are other souls that are 
kindled with love of him, and they, without asking 
how or why, come to him and find him. Their ex- 
perience is that Jesus is with them. One is not 
anxious to analyse the fact of love when one pos- 
sesses the object of one's love : it is enough that the 
love exists. So it is enough for us that in our com- 
munions we do find him whom our soul loveth : that 
we experience the joy of his presence; that we 
know ourselves safe within his arms. To one who 
really finds Jesus in his communions, how insuffer- 
able are all the endless controversies about his 
presence. We know that we find him, and that is 
enough. We know that he comes to the altar, ex- 
pectant of us, and we hasten to meet him there. All 
questioning becomes puerile and inconceivable in the 
face of the fact that he makes himself known to us 
in the breaking of Bread. 

Let us carry this thought of the meeting of Jesus 
out to one more application of it. Wherever are 



122 MEDITATIONS ON THE APOSTLES^ CREED 

the consecrated elements, and for whatever purpose, 
there is Jesus. He reposes in the Tabernacle of the 
Reservation. On some favored altars of the Church 
he condescends to be ever present. No doubt, on 
his part, he longs to be present on more. This is 
the crowning privilege of the Christian Church, that 
it may have its Saviour ever with it. This is the 
crowning joy of the Christian, that at any time he 
may pass into the immediate presence of his Sav- 
iour. Again, do not let us be afraid of theories : 
let us just hold to the fact that when we kneel be- 
fore the tabernacle we are in the immediate presence 
of Jesus. It is merely stupid to let that wonderful 
fact be hidden to us by dread of supposed conse- 
quences, by foolish talk about superstition, and car- 
nal views of the Eucharist. The thing I want to 
know, and the thing I do know, is that when I 
kneel before the Blessed Sacrament I am in the 
Presence of my Lord and Saviour. I can bring my 
weariness and my passionate desires there to him, 
and he hears me. When I need, I can get away 
from the world and be alone with my Saviour. Just 
as in my participation in the public Eucharistic 
worship of the Church I realise my membership in 
the Christian Brotherhood, and feel myself one with 
the Holy Church throughout all the world in its 
adoration of the Divine Mystery, lifting up my 
heart and giving thanks with angels and archangels, 



AND IN JESUS 123 

in the universal worship of the Creator through the 
One Mediator, Christ Jesus. Just as in my com- 
munion I find myself united to the Divine Humanity 
of the Incarnate Son of God, and through that 
union made one with all that are in him : so in my 
approach to Jesus in the Tabernacle I am conscious 
of the door that is open in heaven through him by 
which I may at any time approach the Divine Pres- 
ence, and find the satisfaction of my most intimate 
and personal needs. It is well to remember the 
corporate relations of life and one's union with 
others in the one Body: but there are moments 
when one's separate personality asserts itself, when 
the soul feels the need of lonely intercourse with 
its Saviour: when one would shut out all else and 
be alone with him : when one would clasp his feet 
in the violence of one's personal needs, when one 
would lay one's head upon his breast for comfort, 
when one would cry to him in one's agony for his 
gift of pardon and peace. It is then that the Re- 
served Sacrament means so much to one as the 
ever-ready resort of the solitary soul to its Saviour. 



THE SEVENTH MEDITATION 



THE SEVENTH MEDITATION 

CHRIST 

Let us listen to the words of the Eunuch — 



t 



PRAY thee, of whom speaketh the Prophet 
this ? of himself, or of some other man ? 



Let us picture — 

The Ethiopian Eunuch in his chariot, reading the 
book of Isaiah. He had come to Jerusalem from 
a far land to worship his God; and now, his mis- 
sion accomplished, he is returning home. A long 
and weary journey lies before him, but it will not 
be tedious : he will employ himself with the study 
of the word of God. His interest in that word has 
no doubt been freshly stimulated by his worship at 

127 



128 MEDITATIONS ON THE APOSTLES* CREED 

Jerusalem : perhaps he had never been there before 
and its historic scenes were new to him. Now he 
is reading in the book of Isaiah, "He was led as a 
lamb to the slaughter." What perplexing words: 
how can he tell what they mean ? To him comes St. 
Philip, fresh from his preaching in Samaria. Per- 
haps St. Philip had thought it strange that he should 
be taken away from a successful mission and bid- 
den to go the way from Jerusalem to Gaza "which 
is desert." Why leave one's work to go into the 
loneliness of a desert way? But God has work to 
be done in all ways. The Evangelist breaks in on 
the Eunuch's reading: Understandest thou what 
thou readest? See St. Philip in the chariot, ex- 
plaining the Scriptures. What a wonderfully open 
mind was that of the Eunuch, that he was ready 
to take up a passing stranger and be taught of him. 
What a wonderful lesson that must have been, as 
the chariot rolled southward from Jerusalem to- 
ward Gaza. "Philip opened his mouth and began 
at the same Scripture, and preached unto him 
Jesus." One can find Jesus anywhere in the Scrip- 
tures. One can teach Jesus anywhere on the road. 
Try and see the picture at the close, when the 
chariot stops, "and they went down both into the 
water, both Philip and the Eunuch: and he bap- 
tised him." And the Spirit of the Lord caught 
away Philip, his mission accomplished and the mys- 



CHRIST 129 

tery of the desert road explained. And the Eunuch 
went on his way rejoicing. They probably never 
met again in this life. Imagine the meeting in 
Paradise. 

Consider, first — 

What an incomplete book the Old Testament 
must have seemed to the Jew. This pious man, 
pondering its pages, ends in perplexity. "Of whom 
speaketh the Prophet this?" Such tangled pages 
as there are there. Such promises that seemed to- 
light up the life of Israel as with streaming sun- 
light. But in reality the life of Israel has dwindled 
down to the poor, mean, self-seeking thing it was 
when the Romans came and took away its place 
and nation. Such a revelation of God as was there ; 
of God choosing Israel to be his own Son : and 
then the reality of Israel scattered to the four winds 
of heaven : its land lost, its children coming up 
from far lands to worship at Jerusalem. Such 
hopes as are set before the nation of prosperity and 
dominion: and the pitiful reality that the Eunuch 
would find at Jerusalem, ready to perish through 
the petty jealousies and intrigues of its parties. 
What visions of the future there were in the pages 
of this same Isaiah: but it is centuries since they 
were dreamed, and to-day one could hardly hold 
any faith in them, or expectation of a waking 



130 MEDITATIONS ON THE APOSTLES' CREED 

reality. Yet men, with indestructible faith, con- 
tinued to take up this volume, with its preposterous 
promises, and vanished dreams, and turn its pages 
with hope that the light would still break through. 

Consider, second — 

We still turn the pages, but with what different 
feelings. The morning has come. We no longer 
ask doubting questions, "Of whom speaketh the 
Prophet this?" for a light has fallen upon the 
pages — a light from a life that has realized all the 
promises and actualised all the dreams. The figure 
so dimly adumbrated in the pages of Prophet and 
Psalmist stands revealed to our eyes — the figure of 
the Christ that they with spiritual sight illumined 
by the Holy Ghost saw, and tried to express 
through these words, that other men might see. To 
us, that word, Christ, binds the past and the pres- 
ent, makes of the Old and New Testaments one 
Book : a book of which the central purpose is to 
reveal God to man and restore men to God. 
Through the pages of that book there moves a fig- 
ure that gives it its unity — the figure that is always 
God seeking the salvation of men : that is not more 
clearly God when speaking amid the thunders of 
Sinai, than when he walks by the Sea of Galilee, 
or speaks from the Mount of the Beatitudes, or 
stands by the open grave of Lazarus. "To him give 



CHRIST I3 1 

all the prophets witness," whether they saw him as 
the Son of David once more establishing the fallen 
throne of his Father : or as the pathetic and lonely 
Sufferer for the sins of his people. Wherever you 
turn your face in the Scriptures, you see the face 
of the coming Christ. 

Let us then pray — 

For grace to understand the Word of God. For 
the open heart which keeps its door ajar for him 
to enter. Let us pray for the seeking spirit of the 
Ethiopian. 

Blessed Lord, who hast caused all holy Scriptures 
to be written for our learning : Grant that we may 
in such wise hear them, read, mark, learn and in- 
wardly digest them, that by patience and comfort 
of the holy Word, we may embrace, and ever hold 
fast, the blessed hope of everlasting life, which 
thou hast given us in our Saviour Jesus Christ. 

One sometimes fancies that when we say the 
Creed we fail to attach any very definite meaning 
to our Lord's title of Christ: that we pass it over 
as though it were a surname appended to our Lord's 
human name, Jesus, as indeed it sounds to be in 
English. Or, if we reflect that that is not the case, 
still we do not attach much importance to a mere 
Jewish title the meaning of which is transcended 



15 2 MEDITATIONS ON THE APOSTLES'* CREED 

in the meaning that we attach to our Lord and his 
mission. 

That is an unfortunate way of looking at the 
matter. Much is to be learned both of the method 
of God and the meaning of our Lord's mission from 
a study of the Messianic idea. That idea is the 
chief connecting link between the Old and the New 
Testaments : that which more than anything else 
justifies us in regarding them as the narrative of a 
single action, the fulfilment of a continuous purpose 
of God. It makes good our contention that the Old 
Testament is a revelation of God, and vindicates its 
claim to the possession of prophetic vision. The 
New Testament claim that our Lord is the Messiah 
of the Old Testament asserts that he is the fulfil- 
ment of the prophecies and the accomplishment of 
the promises. To our Lord's contemporaries the 
central interest of his mission was not whether he 
wxre God made man, but whether he were the 
promised Messiah who should vindicate Israel's 
right to be considered the chosen nation, the people 
of God. What was uppermost in the mind of those 
who thought about him at all was whether he were 
the Christ or no. 

The idea of a Messiah who should come in the 
vindicator of God's ways with Israel was one of 
slow growth : and it is one of the best and most 
helpful results of modern criticism of the Old Tes- 



CHRIST 133 

tament that we are able to-day to trace the stages 
of that growth, and note the gradually increasing 
content of that idea as it unfolds in the minds of 
Israel's inspired teachers. The starting point is 
found in the conviction that Israel is God's people, 
and the medium through which his eternal purpose 
is being worked out. In Israel's earliest writings this 
conviction is present as the meaning of the nation's 
life. Israel conceives its life as different from the 
life of other nations. And when you ask the reason 
of the difference, you find that it consists in this : 
(1) That Israel's God differs from the gods of the 
nations in that he is a Holy God and expects holi- 
ness in his people : and (2) That he is the God of 
the whole earth with a future purpose as wide as 
the earth: and (3) That this purpose is to be 
worked out through his people. The peculiarity 
therefore of Israel's position is that it is the medium 
of God's revelation and the instrument of his pur- 
pose. 

This sense of purpose in its own life is perhaps 
the most remarkable thing in the history of Israel. 
There is no other nation in history, I think, of 
which such a thing can be affirmed. And when you 
try to appreciate the naked facts of the history of 
Israel as one among the nations of the world the 
extraordinary nature of this belief becomes plain. 
From the secular point of view the history of Israel 



134 MEDITATIONS ON THE APOSTLES' CREED 

is insignificant. Occupying a narrow strip of land 
in Eastern Asia which nothing but the most optimis- 
tic patriotism could ever have regarded as even 
passably endowed with natural advantages, it had 
almost nothing on which to support a broad na- 
tional life. Its people lacked the aptitudes that 
enabled its northern neighbour, Phcenecia, to create 
a commercial empire. Politically, it was always in 
a state of unstable equilibrium. Huge empires on 
the east and south continually threatened to absorb 
it. Save for two brief periods, when the weakness 
of its neighbours coinciding with the reigns of the 
Israelite kings of marked ability gave it the oppor- 
tunity of a momentary expansion, it was politically 
insignificant. There was little enough, one would 
think, at any period in its career, upon which to 
base a national idealism. And yet that idealism was 
the most striking feature of its life. As interpreted 
by the thought of its intellectual and spiritual lead- 
ers, Israel lived a life of continual expectancy. It 
resolutely turned its eyes away from present mis- 
fortunes and disasters and fixed them on the future 
where it saw, as through a golden mist, the vision 
of an Israel which should be the very embodiment 
of the mind of God for the guidance of human life. 
And if it thought of the future with a consciousness 
of mission that no other nation has ever displayed, 
it thought of its past and its present with a severity 



CHRIST 135 

of self- judgment which is equally unique in human 
history. It judged itself with utter candour. It 
was deeply convinced that its failure to realise the 
ideal national life was the outcome of its own infi- 
delity to its vocation. 

There is something infinitely pathetic in this con- 
sciousness of a vocation to represent God in the 
world coupled with this conviction of repeated fail- 
ure to do so. One would think that under the 
pressure of actuality the sense of vocation would 
have died. But not at all: it rose superior to all 
national disaster : it glowed the brighter through 
the darkness of its seemingly irremediable failure. 
Over the sickening disaster of the fall of Jerusa- 
lem, amid the crash of walls and the smoke of the 
final conflagration, the voice of prophecy rose with 
sublime security telling of a renewed Jerusalem 
and a faithful king. 

At the heart of this inextinguishable hope lies, I 
repeat, Israel's sense of vocation : it is the instrument 
of the purpose of God and, therefore, cannot fail. 
And this purpose of God becomes in time, in the 
thought of Israel's prophets, identified with its 
kingship. It is not only Israel as a nation that is 
the chosen of God, but the vocation centres, as it 
were, in its royal line, the House of David. The 
king, in a special way, is the representative of God. 
Ideally, he is the embodiment of the righteous rule 



1$6 MEDITATIONS ON THE APOSTLES' CREED 

of God : he is to carry out God's thought in the gov- 
ernment of man. As each successive king comes 
to the throne we can imagine him studied by the 
faithful in Israel as a possible embodiment of the 
divine thought, and the sense of hope deferred 
when he is discovered to be like the others, and to 
deserve the monotonous sentence : He did that 
which was evil in the sight of the Lord. Yet the 
failure of the present only served to emphasise the 
promise of the future : a king must rise to reign in 
righteousness, if not this then some other king. As 
the darkness grows deeper, and the national life 
sinks lower, the vision becomes clearer : deliverance 
will come through a person — a true king after 
God's own heart. 

But the kingship itself passes from Israel. Men 
still continue to look for a new king and a renewed 
kingdom : but in the thought of prophets and psalm- 
ists a change passes over the future. A new figure 
emerges, with vague outlines, but with no uncertain 
content. It is the figure of a prophetic teacher. It 
had been characteristic of Israel's thought of itself 
that it was not only called of God to a vocation 
which would one day be realised through a right- 
eous king : but that its religious life was continually 
guided by men whose mission it was to speak to it 
in the name of God. These teachers it was, indeed, 
that kept alive Israel's sense of its vocation. Its 



CHRIST 137 

very vocation was prophetic. The truth of God 
that had been committed to Israel was theirs as a 
trust : one day it would go out from them to trans- 
form the world. So their vision of the future came 
to shape itself about the conception of a prophet- 
nation of which the function seems at times to be 
incarnate in the figure of one transcendent prophet. 
And the prophet-nation or the transcendent prophet, 
so the vision fluctuates, will be able to execute his 
mission of enlightenment only through suffering. 
Israel reads aright its own history and the history 
of humanity. It is only through suffering that 
truth is proclaimed or assimilated. 

There is one more element in this prophetic vis- 
ion. Israel's conviction of its own failure to an- 
swer to the demands of God upon it was profound. 
It deeply felt that it was a sinful nation. Surely 
then the fulfilment of the promise would involve, 
nay, necessitate, dealing with sin. There was need 
of priest and sacrifice. The promised cleansing 
must be mediated. So the thought of the priest 
who, like king and prophet, should be the repre- 
sentative of God to Israel, and yet should grow out 
of Israel's own life, came to take its place in the 
Messianic vision. 

Thus it was that by brooding over the problems 
of its national life and the relation of God to that 
life that the conviction grew up that the future of 



138 MEDITATIONS ON THE APOSTLES' CREED 

Israel would be shaped by One who should embody 
the separate guiding elements in that life — One who 
should be Prophet, Priest and King. I have pre- 
sented the matter thus in detachment from indi- 
vidual prophecies because we cannot always be sure 
of the detailed application of them. But we are 
sure of this, which is more important than the 
meaning of separate passages in the Old Testa- 
ment, that the whole life of Israel has a forward 
look. It recognizes its own incompleteness and 
relies on the future for its completion. It is per- 
fectly sure of its vocation, and that present failure 
will not prevent the realisation of the purpose of 
God. That stands sure: and it is sure, too, that 
when the purpose of God is unfolded it will be 
through One who will gather up in himself all the 
meaning of Israel's past : who will be perfectly what 
Israel was called to be and has so lamentably failed 
to be, God's Son. And being that, he will also be 
the King of the line of David who shall be after 
God's heart : the prophet suffering for his people : 
the priest forever after the order of Melchizedek. 
All this was summed up in the title given him, the 
Messiah, the Christ. 

When we turn to the pages of the New Testa- 
ment and the life of our Lord as it is presented 
there, the thing that is plain to us is that our Lord 
assumes to occupy toward the life of his people this 



CHRIST 139 

character that is marked out for the Messiah in the 
prophetic life of Israel. He is not much concerned 
in his ministry with the effect of his ministry on 
the world. He is sent to the lost sheep of the 
House of Israel, and he declines to be turned away 
from that mission. His endeavour is to be accepted 
as the Messiah, the Christ. His pretention is to be 
the Prophet, Priest and King for whom Israel is 
looking. We are not concerned here with the de- 
gree or nature of his success. What concerns us is 
the Messianic character itself, and the way in which 
our Lord vindicated his claim to it. 

The mission of the prophet is to make known the 
mind of God. We cannot find out the mind of 
God for ourselves : we can only know it as it is 
revealed to us. The mind of God was gradually 
made known through the inspired teachers of the 
Old Testament. But it was not made known in its 
completeness, that is, its completeness for our needs 
and for God's purposes for us, until it was made 
known by our Lord. It is not so much our Lord's 
words that make known the mind of God, as him- 
self. He is the revelation of God : when we study 
him we learn as much of God as we can know. 
"No man hath seen God at any time : the Only Be- 
gotten Son that is in the bosom of the Father, he 
hath declared him." 

But the revelation that is in Christ is not some 



140 MEDITATIONS ON THE APOSTLES CREED 

new revelation by which the revelation that is in 
the Old Testament is set aside : it is the continuance 
of the same revelation. There is one purpose of 
God running through all history : and that purpose 
is to save man by Christ. In Christ the purpose is 
made clear, because in him God is made known. 

To us, then, Christ is the Revealer of the ways 
of God : those dark, winding ways, as men think 
they are as they tread them, run out into the sunny 
meadows of God's love. We may be uncertain of 
many things : but we can never be uncertain of 
that love when once we have looked into the face 
of Christ. All God's love and mercy and pitifulness 
are there. It was this that lured men and enticed 
them. Those who had an ideal of the Christ hid- 
den in their souls, when they had been near him for 
any time, when they had heard his voice and looked 
into his eyes, recognised him. "This is he of whom 
Moses and the prophets wrote," they told their 
friends. "Come and see a man that told me all the 
things that ever I did," they wondered. "Thou 
art the Christ," they confessed. That was his 
claim, too, when he was adjured by the high priest, 
"Tell us whether thou be the Christ?" Jesus said 
unto him, "Thou hast said." 

As we study our Lord's life, then, what we are 
learning is the way in which God looks upon human 
life. So many of us grow up with a dread of God : 



CHRIST I4 1 

there seems a chilling distance between him and 
us. The watchful eye, that to us represents his 
Providence, seems seeking our inmost thoughts for 
the hidden sins that lurk there. We fear that he 
will find there sins that we ourselves have not dis- 
covered. We live in an atmosphere of dread about 
ourselves. I do not wish to underrate sin : but that 
is certainly not God's attitude toward it, for it is 
not Christ's. If he looks upon the hidden sin it is 
that he may lead us to confess it : and even in our 
pitiful inability to confess it, he says : "Son, thy 
sins be forgiven thee." The attitude toward him- 
self that he tries to elicit from us is that of trustful 
confidence. The Father, in him, shows as one to 
whom we may confide our lives. "He that cometh 
to me I will in no wise cast out." No one shrank 
from him : he drew out the best in every nature. 

But, on the other hand, he expected that men 
should live up to that best. It happened that he 
inspired in men an optimism about themselves that 
was not well founded : that could not stand the test 
of execution : and in that case he revealed them to 
themselves by the demand that they act upon their 
professions. He never hesitated to apply such tests. 
And it was best for men that they should learn to 
distinguish between a superficial enthusiasm and 
the entire devotion of their lives. That was a pa- 
thetic collapse of profession that was, no doubt, 



142 MEDITATIONS ON THE APOSTLES' CREPT) 

perfectly sincere, in the Young Ruler who went 
away sorrowful because he had great possessions 
which were more to him than our Lord. That was 
a stern test of devotion when he said, "Let the dead 
bury their dead." That was a high standard that 
he applied, "No man having put his hand to the 
plow and looking back is fit for the kingdom of 
God." That was a very striking scene, when the 
sons of Zebedee came with their request to sit, the 
one on his right hand and the other on his left, in 
his kingdom. "Can you drink of the cup that 
I shall drink of, and be baptised with the baptism 
that I am baptised with ?" he asks. And when they 
profess their ability, he gives them the cup and the 
baptism, but not the seat. So he tests those who 
would come near him. 

The thought of God that we gather, then, is that 
of One who will be long-suffering and patient with 
our weakness : who will forgive the sin that is 
brought to him : but who also will test our profes- 
sions of allegiance to the uttermost. There are 
moments of enthusiasm in our lives when we seem 
to ourselves to have given ourselves to God with- 
out reserve : when we say, "Master, 1 will follow 
thee whithersoever thou goest." These are mo- 
ments of solemn dedication when we deliberately 
offer our lives to God : when we see clearly that 
the worth of life is its worth to him, and it seems 



CHRIST I43 

to us a small thing to give all to him in a holy life. 
We seem to have caught the meaning of the words 
"He that loseth his life shall save it." And then 
the tide ebbs, and leaves us stranded on a barren 
shore. There come cold, grey hours when we front 
the sacrifice that we are making with bitter search- 
ing of heart. It seems to us quite impossible that 
we should keep to the resolution that we had made. 
We find that it involves a severity of discipline, a 
sacrifice of the will, an abandonment of self, that 
we had not imagined. The process of selling all 
that we have is a painful process. You here in the 
convent know something of that : and that it is not 
a sale once for all, as you fondly thought, but a 
daily parting with prized possessions. But alleg- 
iance must be more than facile words : and if we 
had only words on our lips, and not eager love in 
our hearts — love that was more than the love of 
any earthly thing — we must know that too. 

The priesthood of the Messiah was a thing just 
hinted at in the Old Testament : but in our Lord's 
unfolding of the Messianic Mission it assumes quite 
other proportions. It is the function of the priest 
to reconcile man to God, and our Lord's work is 
presented to us as pre-eminently a work of recon- 
ciliation. The Godward effect of his Incarnate 
work is something that we are unable to fathom: 
but it certainly is not properly described as the 



144 MEDITATIONS ON THE APOSTLES' CREED 

pacification of an angry God. On the manward 
side we know that work as the bringing man back 
to God. Through our union with him we are ad- 
mitted into union with the Father. He offers him- 
self, the one true and perfect sacrifice, and, in him, 
we partake of the results of that sacrifice. 

To us, then, the Christ is the way of approach 
to God. "I am the door," he says of himself. It 
is one of the constant joys of our religion that the 
way of God is constantly open. I could not know 
this without the revelation of God made through 
the Son. It is the Incarnation that makes me feel 
the nearness of God and his readiness to receive 
me. And even with the Incarnation and our ac- 
ceptance of its theological meaning, we are all too 
prone to fail in trust toward God : we are ever full 
of doubts and hesitations and suspicions in com- 
mitting our lives to him. We act as though there 
were some doubt about the door being open, as 
though Christ's sacrifice did not actually include 
us, as though we needed something else to plead 
beside that — some merit or achievement of our own. 

I have found in practical dealing with souls that 
failure in hope and trust is one of the common 
failures of even those who are well along in the 
spiritual life. We find it hard to face the future, 
especially, in just simple trust in the sacrifice of 
our Lord as the sufficient guarantee that all will be 



CHRIST x 45 

well with us. One of our common weaknesses is 
that we want to see too far ahead. Our Lord's 
"Take no thought for the morrow" seems an im- 
practical rule of life. How can we help looking 
and planning ahead? Looking and planning our 
lives as best we may — no doubt that is wise: but 
the constant anxiety as to how the future is to turn 
out — that is not wise. I think that one who is care- 
ful to submit all his life to God in simple trust in 
him will have found over and over again in his 
experience, that the trouble that he borrowed and 
the anxiety he felt were, in the event, proved fool- 
ish and unnecessary. God rules and shapes our 
lives; and though we may not see how the path 
runs in the far distance we always see enough of 
the path to walk in now : and when the dreaded day 
breaks on which we had spent so much anxious 
care there is a sun that lights it and our cares prove 
to have been foolishness. God makes our way 
known to us when it is time for us to know it. We 
need not be anxious about what is going to happen 
in the future : we need only to keep our lives as in 
God's Presence. When we have learned how to 
join those lives to the life of our Lord and make 
them part of his priestly offering which he presents 
before the throne of the Father, we shall have 
learned to want to know less about the future, and 
be content with our union with Christ now as con- 



I46 MEDITATIONS ON THE APOSTLES* CRSED 

taining in itself all the pledge of the future that we 
need. 

The Kingship of the Messiah was that side of his 
work that impressed itself most deeply on the minds 
of the writers of the Old Testament. It was that 
that Israel looked forward to as the cause of its 
national vocation and the meaning of its life. The 
Messiah was to realise on earth the perfect rule of 
God — that rule that Israel's kings had so strikingly 
failed to manifest. The coming age was to be the 
time of Messianic reign — a true and perfect king- 
dom of God. 

There is no more pathetic instance of man's fail- 
ure to read aright the thought of God than the con- 
ception of King Messiah and his kingdom which 
developed in the mind of Israel. Israel was unable 
to read God's care of them and his work through 
them in other terms than those of divine favourite- 
ism. The Messiah's rule meant to them the tem- 
poral and material triumph of Israel as a worldly 
kingdom. The homage of the nations to King Mes- 
siah was translated to mean the bringing of tem- 
poral wealth and power to Israel. It could not but 
be a rude shock when our Lord proclaimed his 
Messiahship on quite different lines : My kingdom 
is not of this world. An expansion of the truths 
contained in Israel's religion and their triumph over 



CHRIST 147 

the souls of men was not at all what Israel had 
expected, or, indeed, wanted. 

Yet that, it turned out, was the meaning of Mes- 
siah's universal reign. Our Lord, indeed, came as 
a King and proclaimed a kingdom, but citizenship 
in that kingdom was open to all men of good will. 
The nationalistic hopes of later Judaism vanished, 
and the disillusionment was bitter. Yet it need not 
have been : that is a wider reign than any temporal 
kingdom could have attained. The Messiah rules 
to-day with a rule as wide as the rule of God. It 
is through him that God manifests himself to men. 

The claim of our Lord to be king is, perhaps, of 
all his claims the hardest for men to recognise, for 
it involves the practical abandonment of their lives 
to him. It requires the submission of our thoughts 
and conduct: it requires the acceptance of an ex- 
ternal standard to which they are to be referred. 
To live from day to day in submission to the will 
of another is not an easy thing. The favourite 
ground of revolt is the mental — against the thought 
that the rule of Messiah should manifest itself in 
the assertion of final truth : that the Christian re- 
ligion should be a dogmatic religion. But although 
that is the objection that is commonest on men's 
lips, it is not, as matter of fact, what they find 
most objectionable. The real revolt is a revolt 
against Christianity as imposing a certain ideal of 



148 MEDITATIONS ON THE APOSTLES' CREED 

conduct. Those who are most submissive to dog- 
matic truth, experience in their lives the difficulty 
of holding to the type of conduct that Christianity 
requires. Large sections of society to-day are in 
open revolt against the ideals of conduct that are 
embodied in the Christ-life. His meekness, his 
humility, his purity, his peaceableness, his denunci- 
ation of materialism and self-seeking, his com- 
mendation of sacrifice and self-denial, when they 
are proposed as the ideals of conduct to men of the 
twentieth century, are received with impatience or 
disregarded as impracticable mysticism. We read 
much of the crisis of faith in these days : but the 
crisis of faith is much less intense than the crisis 
of loyalty. There are plenty who are willing to say, 
Lord, Lord: not so many who seek to do the will 
of the Father. 

We experience this in the moral struggle of our 
own lives. It is difficult to keep to a high standard, 
especially when that standard is not endorsed by 
our neighbours. As society drifts away in revolt 
from the ideals of the Gospel, it becomes increas- 
ingly difficult for us to stand up against it. Yet to 
live simply in the light of the life of Jesus is the 
effective way in which we testify to his kingship. 
The world's protest against strictness should only 
lead to greater carefulness of life on our part. If 
the Christ is my King, I must be careful not to 



CHRIST 149 

lapse into the Jewish attitude toward the kingship, 
as one that confers favours rather than obligations ; 
as one that tolerates laxity in return for a super- 
ficial profession of allegiance. It is still possible 
that the children of the kingdom be cast into the 
outer darkness, because they have conceived the 
kingdom as privilege rather than devotion ; because 
they have thought themselves the favourites of 
Providence, rather than the slaves of God, 



THE EIGHTH MEDITATION 



THE EIGHTH MEDITATION 

HIS ONLY SON 

Let us listen to the zvords of the Father — 

^^HIS is my beloved Son in whom I am well 
^^ pleased : hear ye him. 

Let us picture — 

The Mount of the Transfiguration. Our Lord 
has chosen three of his Apostles and brought them 
here. Imagine them toiling up the mountain side, 
wondering what new experience is before them. 
Our Lord is always opening new experiences to 
them. Think of the constant wonder that our Lord 
must have been to his Apostles. Such undreamed- 
of sayings: such startling revelations come from 
him. He is always taking men up into mountains 

i53 



15 a MEDITATIONS ON THE APOSTLES CREED 

of vision, exceeding high. From the summit they 
look out over the towns of the Holy Land, each 
name recalling wonderful dealings of God with his 
people. And then, as they look back at our Lord, 
the stupefying change. His face — that familiar 
face — where they were wont to read eager love, 
sympathetic understanding, or, at times, quick dis- 
approval — that face shines as the sun. And then 
the vision : Moses and Elijah, and the words half- 
understood : St. Peter's suggestion : the pointless 
suggestion of a dazed man who felt that he ought to 
say something: and then the voice from the cloud, 
'This is my beloved Son." The vision passes and 
there remains with them "Jesus only" : remains, too, 
an imperishable memory of a veil drawn aside while 
human eyes look into eternity and human ears hear 
the voice of the Creator. Imagine the stillness of 
soul with which they come down from the mount- 
tain to find themselves again in what we call "the 
real world," but which to them, after the mount, 
must have seemed but vision. 

Consider, first — 

That intimacy with Jesus must have as its result 
his unveiling of himself : it means that he lets us 
deeper and deeper into his secret until we see his 
face shine as the sun: until we perceive in some 
measure the hidden side of his life : until we find 



HIS ONLY SON 155 

his ultimate explanation in that he is the beloved 
Son. 

We read our Gospels at first with the perception 
of a man who now and again does wonderful and 
inexplicable things, who stupefies us with displays 
of superhuman power, who troubles our conscious- 
ness with utterances of whose mysterious depths 
we are dimly conscious, while we know that we 
only clasp the fringes of them. But as we read and 
read again with sympathetic meditation our vision 
is clarified, and the garments of human words 
wherein the revelation is contained becomes white 
and glistering, and we catch the underlying signifi- 
cance — "This is my beloved Son." 

The Apostles whom he chose rose from that first 
wonder-smitten stage of unfamiliarity, that sense of 
being in an untravelled country of words and acts 
where previous experience was of small use as a 
guide, and the accustomed ways of looking at life 
were being set aside, to the perception of a new 
and deeper consistency in dealing with life, which 
was the result of its being viewed and judged from 
the standpoint of a personality which is freed from 
human limitations and conventions and contradic- 
tions, and of which the secret must be sought in the 
intimate relation of their Master with God. 

This first stage was marked by their acceptance 
with Jesus as the Messiah. In the later stage their 



156 MEDITATIONS ON THE APOSTLES' CREED 

conceptions of the Messiah deepened to a concep- 
tion of his divinity, as alone consistent with his 
words and acts. This experience is repeated in each 
of us as we approach Jesus through the contempla- 
tion of his life. 

Consider, second — 

We* miss this if we linger at the foot of the 
mountain with the crowd, and refuse his invitation 
to go with him to the heights where alone visions 
may be seen and voices heard. The difficulty of 
the ascent deters many feet, and explains why so 
many can still think of Jesus as only some sort of 
human leader; or accepting the traditions of the 
Church, as to his real personality, yet possess but 
a motionless faith, having failed of the personal ex- 
perience of him which alone reveals his secret. Let 
us ask ourselves whether there has been this failure 
of energy in us. Whether our search for his secret 
has stopped at the mountain foot where we vainly 
struggle to heal imbecile children, and find our faith 
too weak to overcome the devil's temptation because 
of our lack of spiritual discipline. Doubt and hesi- 
tancy and half-heartedness and weariness of ser- 
vice are banished, not when we have heard or even 
seen his wondrous works, but when we have actu- 
ally been with him in the Holy Mount. But when 
we have once seen him transfigured before us, and 



HIS ONLY SON 157 

had his meaning revealed to us by the voice of the 
Father, then we return to the routine of life with 
a new hopefulness and a new power, because in 
discovering the secret of Jesus we have discovered 
the secret of ourselves, that by our union with him 
we are so united with God, that we are lifted above 
earth to dwell with him in heavenly places, in such 
wise that we no longer grope doubtfully and im- 
potently in the mists that wrap the mountain foot, 
but from the security of the hills look out upon the 
world and life made plain by the flashing splendour 
of the revelation of God. 

Let us pray, then — 

To ascend with Jesus to the Mount of Transfig- 
uration ; so to meditate upon his life, that the reality 
of his Sonship may become plain to us, and we also 
may learn to realise our vocation as the sons of 
God. 

O God, who on the mount didst reveal to chosen 
witnesses thine Only Begotten Son wonderfully 
transfigured, in raiment white and glistering, merci- 
fully grant that we, being delivered from the dis- 
quietude of this world, may be permitted to behold 
the King in his beauty, who with thee, O Father, 
and thee, O Holy Ghost, liveth and reigneth, one 
God world without end. 



158 MEDITATIONS ON THE APOSTLES* CREED 

I have already in an earlier meditation spoken as 
seemed necessary of the eternal sonship of our Lord. 
I shall, therefore, in asking you to think of this 
clause of the Creed — his only Son — pass by so much 
of the subject as concerns the eternal relation of the 
persons of the Trinity and speak only of our Lord's 
Sonship as that is manifested to us. 

Our Lord likes to speak of himself as son of man, 
thus emphasising that relation, that identity of in- 
terest, that solidarity with us, which is the result of 
his Incarnation. But in the background there must 
always be the thought that the Incarnation effected 
any result because the person incarnate is the Son 
of God. He came forth from the Father and came 
into the world : and it is this mission that rises to 
our minds when we think of him as the Son of 
God: we think only with effort of the eternal gen- 
eration of the Son of God : and when we have made 
our best effort have got little that the human mind 
can fathom. But we think easily of that sending of 
the divine Son into the world to be the Saviour of 
the world, which is the central theme of the Chris- 
tian religion. 

One of the things that first impresses us in our 
Lord's work is the ever-present consciousness of 
mission that we perceive in him. Whatever he 
does is done with reference to this. There is in 
him nothing of the tentative that we feel present 



HIS ONLY SON 159 

when we are studying the life of the human leader. 
As we turn the earlier pages of the biographies, 
whose final chapters we know will chronicle great 
achievements and the great responsibilities of life 
nobly met, we are impressed by the blindness with 
which our hero is going forth into the future. If 
he could foresee, there are so many things he would 
do differently. Here are opportunities missed, and 
their energy is exercised in directions which will 
be mere waste from the point of view of the later 
life. There is much that is tentative and experi- 
mental : and when at last the career is found, it is, 
from the human side, found almost by chance. You 
do not feel this groping towards the unknown in 
our Lord; you feel, though you may not see how, 
that all his acts or words are from the first selected 
with reference to their bearing upon his mission. 
To the careless reader of the Gospel it may seem 
that he is a mere wandering teacher that gathers 
crowds to hear him where he can, and is sowing 
the seed that may or may not fructify, snatching a 
success here, or accepting a failure there, as any 
teacher must: but a little deeper study reveals a 
reference of all he does to the central purpose of his 
mission. His teaching is not a mere hopeful cast- 
ing of seed broadcast, if perchance some may fall 
on good ground and take root : rather he is care- 
fully testing human souls for the purpose of draw- 



160 MEDITATIONS ON THE APOSTLES' CREED 

ing from the multitudes such, if any there be, as can 
and will co-operate in the great work. He is not 
trying to convert as many as possible : he is trying 
to discover in whom sympathy with his aims and 
love of his person will furnish the suitable starting 
point for his work. And as God makes use of the 
evil as well as the good in working to his ends, so 
our Lord chooses not only a St. Peter and a St. 
John but also a Judas with a view of their service- 
ableness. He himself selects the facts of his own 
human life with the same end in view ; choosing 
pain and suffering and death because through them 
lies the road to the success of his mission. 

And a successful human life is one lived in the 
same spirit, is it not? A life lived with the same 
careful selection and rejection of possible facts and 
experiences with the view to their influence on life 
as a whole, on the pre-determined end of life. How 
frequently our failures result from neglect of this 
obvious lesson to be drawn from our Lord's treat- 
ment of his mission. We do not fail through defec- 
tive intention : we fail through clumsiness and care- 
lessness of execution. We fail because we will not 
face the hardness and the discipline that are in- 
volved in the course of action that will lead to suc- 
cess. We grow very weary under the strain and 
the will fails and we abandon the work before we 
have attained our end. Take a very common mat- 



HIS ONLY SON l6l 

ter. We are constantly complaining that our 
prayers are not answered : but what do we mean by 
our prayers? A few petitions offered now and 
again, a collect said with a special intention. We 
have knocked, we say, and the door has not been 
opened. Now read this verse of the Gospel of St. 
Luke : "And it came to pass in those days, that he 
went up into a mountain to pray and continued all 
night in prayer to God." That is the prayer that is 
answered : it continues until it is answered. St. 
Paul reports of his work that it is carried on in 
weariness and painfulness, but not therefore aban- 
doned. If we are convinced that it is God's will 
that we undertake a certain work we are surely not 
to be shaken in this conviction by its apparent fail- 
ure. I remember the case of a priest who deter- 
mined to form a men's club in his parish and called 
a meeting of men for the purpose of effecting an 
organisation. No one but the sexton attended. 
The priest and the sexton agreed to say a prayer 
daily for the club. For more than a year the meet- 
ing of the club was announced each Sunday without 
any further increase of membership. But the priest 
and the sexton still said the collect : and at last the 
club actually came into existence. The life of a 
priest or of a sister must go to ruin again and again 
if it depended for its continuance upon actually 
realised accomplishment. But it does not depend 



l62 MEDITATIONS ON THE APOSTLES' CREED 

upon that, it depends upon the sense of divine 
vocation to the work and life. There may be also 
all sorts of failure experienced ; the one failure that 
is impossible is failure to keep on. 

What lies at the root of our Lord's Sonship as 
manifested in his earthly mission is the love of the 
Holy Trinity for men. The love of God is empha- 
sised to us when we contemplate the barrier that 
had to be broken down, the dreary wastes of pain 
that had to be traversed and the dangers that had 
to be encountered before it could be manifested at 
all. This is one of the most astonishing of all the 
astonishing utterances of Holy Scripture : "In this 
was manifested the love of God toward us because 
that God sent his Only Begotten Son into the world, 
that we might live through him." Humanity has 
never been slow to recognize its own evil case : 
and it is written whole libraries of passionate 
declamation upon the theme of its sufferings. It 
has met the facts of its lot with an heroic optimism 
which the facts themselves seem to prove mere 
insanity : it has cursed God and died in bitter rebel- 
lion against a fate it could not change. But no 
human appreciation of the evils that are involved 
in life equals the insight and intensity of the divine 
appreciation of the same facts. God does not deny 
the facts or the evil of them. He does not apolo- 
gise for them as men have attempted to apologise, 



HIS ONLY SON 163 

through over-zeal for God's honour, by asserting 
that the evil is only apparent, or some lower kind 
of good. No : God accepts the facts and sends the 
Only Begotten Son to the rescue : and that we are 
pitied and sought of God is the consolation, if not 
the explanation, of all our ill and pain. 

This mission of the Son, then, is a mission of 
pity and self-sacrifice consequent upon pity — the 
coming to the rescue of one who might have con- 
ceivably stood apart. You say that, for this world, 
at least, the mission is ineffective : that nothing is 
hindered or bettered. But is that true? Not one 
pain, men say, has been abolished by the Gospel. 
Whatever pains we have gotten rid of, we have 
gotten rid of by the advance of humanity's knowl- 
edge of itself. Jesus healed, if you will, a sick man 
here and there ; but he abolished no disease, and 
modern science is doing that. Disease after dis- 
ease loses its power before the advance of modern 
medicine. But the Gospel has done for those who 
will accept it what no science can or will do. It 
has abolished the greatest of all diseases — fear. It 
left us no doubt with our pain-racked bodies till 
such time as we ourselves shall find the remedies 
for pain. But it left us fearless before the ultimate 
consequence of disease, death. With a gloriously 
sound body we may still look out with staring and 
fear-smitten eyes : but with the Gospel of the Sen 



164 MEDITATIONS ON THE APOSTLES' CREED 

in our hands we may look from a body pain-racked 
and tortured, with eyes that smile and are satisfied, 
because they look not out into a feared unknown, 
but look out through a darkness that has broken 
and see the face of God. 

The mission of the Son, therefore, is a mission, 
not to effect immediate palliation of the evils that 
beset us, but to effect a change in our eternal rela- 
tions, which when once we realise it, is far more to 
us than any remedy of present conditions could be. 
He effects this change by self-identification with us, 
through which we are raised to a share in his own 
Sonship. Instead of making us, as modern specu- 
lation would suggest that he ought to have done, if 
his purpose was at all to help us, healthy and happy 
animals, in a world freed from care and sorrow, he 
made us the sons of God and partakers of the 
divine nature. He lowered himself in order to 
raise us to himself. It is only because we take 
short and limited views of existence that we fail to 
feel the significance of the divine action. Most of 
us have but a vague and theoretical interest in the 
future. It is only with immense difficulty that the 
average man thinks of himself as immortal in any 
such way as shall affect his present life. But it is 
only because of our immortality that the mission of 
the Son is important. Christianity affects our 
social position in the present world: but on the 



HIS ONLY SON 165 

whole that effect is in the nature of a by-product. 
Having become the sons of God and acting in that 
character, we do improve the world about us be- 
cause we encourage the things that are pure and 
noble and Christ-like and eliminate the contrary- 
things. 

In other words, by being raised to the state of 
sonship we become partakers of the mission of our 
Lord. For sonship must be an active quality in us 
as it was in him. We realise that we are not in the 
world vaguely to do good, but to perceive and to 
co-operate with the purpose of God. This means, 
among other things, seeking work through Christ, 
not seeking Christ through work. The opposite is 
frequently commended. "Be active in good works 
and you cannot fail to please and to find God." It 
is not so sure : you may quite fail to find God, and 
in place of him find a self amused or gratified, ab- 
sorbed in its own activities : you may, by that road, 
quite easily miss the need of God, and come to 
value work as an end and not as a ministry. The 
love of our neighbour as our neighbour tends to lose 
vitality through the paltriness of the neighbour 
viewed as the human individual in greater or less 
need. We tend to tire of beggars and drunkards 
and harlots. We feel less the need of aiding them 
and more the need of eliminating them. Indeed, 
charity is greatly in disfavour of to-day. We only 



1 66 MEDITATIONS ON THE APOSTLES* CREED 

recover our equilibrium when we get back to the 
biblical view. The human individual has claims 
upon us to which we gladly respond, not because 
he is a man, but because he is a divine. He is the 
son of God, however degraded and strayed. He is 
the representative of Christ to whom we minister 
when we minister to him. "Inasmuch as ye did it 
unto one of the least of these my brethren ye did it 
unto me." 

But, as I have already pointed out, we misunder- 
stand our Lord's mission if we regard it as a mis- 
sion of relief. Only accidentally did it relieve men. 
It sought to put society upon a new and more stable 
foundation by the creation of the Kingdom of God. 
Ideally, the kingdoms of this world are to be dis- 
placed or transformed into the new kingdom. It is 
the new heaven and the new earth wherein dwelleth 
righteousness : new, because righteousness dwells in 
it. We have no right to wave this conception aside 
as negatived by the event. The event is not yet. 
No doubt the parochial system of the present-day 
church is not the new heaven and the new earth, or 
appreciably on the way towards it. But all the more 
shall we look for it and decline to acquiesce in the 
pessimism of those who murmur, "Since the fathers 
fell asleep all things continue as they were from the 
foundation of the world." The mission of the Son 
of God is not yet completed : it entered a new stage 



HIS ONLY SON 167 

when it was committed to that extended Sonship 
which is the Body of Christ. At present the accom- 
plishment of the mission of Christ waits on our 
wills. The new heaven and the new earth become 
realities as fast as we want them to be real. The 
tremendous amount of social injustice that there is 
and that the Church is weakly acquiescing in is not 
of God's creation but of man's, and will vanish 
when men want it to vanish. It is not a divine law 
that entails poverty and suffering upon humanity, 
but human stupidity. We, in our laxity, have 
almost forgotten the line of demarcation between 
the kingdom of God and the kingdom of this world. 
We are confused between purely worldly motives 
and ideals and those of the kingdom. The kingdom 
will begin to come with power when Christian 
society shall once more conceive itself as a thing 
apart, with a mission to transform the world. 

It is a pitiful thing to see the mission that Christ 
began, the mission of converting the world to 
righteousness, and which was maintained, in theory 
at least, so long, as the ideal of the Christian 
Church, pass from the Church to those who care 
nothing for the religious ideal and cannot handle 
it. We cannot blind ourselves to the fact that to- 
day, the forces that make for the betterment of 
society have largely passed out of the control of 
the Body of Christ. Men live and work to-day 



1 68 MEDITATIONS ON THE APOSTLES' CREED 

with immense earnestness of a new heaven and 
earth wherein dwelleth, not righteousness, but jus- 
tice — which is quite a different thing. For justice 
does not imply an inner change, a conversion, but 
an outward relation. Men are looking for a world 
ordered by their own efforts and unrelated to God. 
For this ideal they display all the zeal of primitive 
Christians, while the successors of the primitive 
Christians, of the men who revolutionised the Ro- 
man Empire, look on with languid protests at the 
secularisation of all things which they had not the 
energy to keep sacred. We have secular education 
and secular marriage and secular charity only be- 
cause the Church lost the sense of its mission and 
the splendour of its vocation as the representative 
of the Son of God. The pity is that these secular- 
ised things could not exist except as supported by 
Christianity. The resources of the Church are 
drawn off to them. 

"He made a whip of small cords and drove them 
out, and his disciples remembered that it was writ- 
ten, the zeal of thine house hath even consumed 
me." It is written still : and the zeal still burns in 
heaven; but the flame of it has died on the earth. 
The modern representatives of the kingdom of God 
are anxious about good music and decorous preach- 
ing and a large confirmation class. "The rector 
presented the largest class in the history of the par- 



HIS ONLY SON 1 69 

ish. The large proportion of men was noticeable." 
"Is it peace, Jehu?" 

One feels of oneself that whatever else one is 
doing one is not fulfilling the mission of the Son of 
God. One is thrown back on the poor consolation 
that one can at least cultivate one's own garden and 
realise oneself as the child of God. It is only a 
partial thing at best ; but one does show oneself the 
Son of God by the conquests that one makes. At 
any rate we can have our own lights trimmed and 
burning and be ready to go in with the Bridegroom 
to the marriage. There is yet time, the foolish vir- 
gins said : but the wise were always ready. "Be- 
hold I come as a thief," our Lord says. There will 
come the day of awakening when the Presence of 
the Lord and the Advent of his kingdom will be 
proclaimed. Happy shall we be if in that day we 
recognise his voice and go out to meet him. There 
is a sound of a gong in the tops of the mulberry 
trees even now. The world is ready to rebel 
against the hideous slavery that we call civilisation. 
It is quite possible that the sleeping Church will be 
as incapable as was the Jewish Church of recognis- 
ing the Advent of its King, in an unexpected and, 
to it, an indecorous form. It may again see no 
comeliness in him that it should desire him. Happy 
shall we be, if when we would pass him by thinking, 
"It is the gardener," he speaks to us and we fall at 
his feet, crying, "Rabboni, my Master." 



THE NINTH MEDITATION 



THE NINTH MEDITATION 

OUR LORD 
Let us listen to the words of our Lord — 



® 



E call me Master and Lord, and ye say well, 
for so I am. 



Let us picture — 

The scene after the passion supper when our 
Lord rises and girds himself with a tovel and 
washes his disciples' feet. We see them still re- 
clining about the supper table and submitting with 
astonishment to this strange act of our Lord. Most 
of them, though they cannot understand the reason 
for this act of our Lord, yet submit in silence, con- 
tent to believe that it has a reason. But with his 
usual impulsiveness, St. Peter protests. St. Peter 

i73 



174 MEDITATIONS ON THE APOSTLES' CREED 

is always assuming that he understands the prob- 
lem when the other disciples are content to accept 
the action of our Lord. St. Peter is ready to pro- 
test against his course. But he quickly recedes be- 
fore our Lord's words, "If I wash thee not thou 
hast no part in me." Try to see our Lord as he 
passes from one to the other of them, pouring water 
on their feet and then wiping them. "I am among 
you as he that serveth," he had once said. A God, 
wiping men's feet — do we revolt from the thought? 
Only for a moment, if we know anything of God. 
This is quite what one would expect God to do. He 
has always been wiping men's feet — attending to 
their least necessities. God is always with us, prov- 
identially directing our lives. We can sound our 
own experience and find God there intimately car- 
ing for all our needs. Recall your own experience, 
how intimate God has been with you. How few 
your sins have been in the vast multitude of the 
sins of the world ; yet God has heard your confes- 
sions and been faithful and just to forgive you your 
sins. 

Consider, first — 

That we quite miss the facts about God when we 
consider him a God afar off and not nigh at hand. 
The Incarnation was intended to break down that 
thought of God by revealing, not some new attitude 



OUR LORD 175 

of God, some afterthought in his method of dealing 
with men, but what had been his constant attitude 
toward them. Yet we still find immense difficulty 
in making this revealed attitude of God practical to 
our lives — in basing our attitude to God upon it. 
We still tend to think of parts of our lives as too 
paltry to be brought to God — of things as too small 
to be put in our prayers. We still think of this act 
of our Lord as being a temporary act, undertaken, 
doubtless, to teach a needed lesson to the apostles. 
They were going out to deal with men and needed 
a lesson in the virtue of humility. But it is not that 
God humbled himself once to teach humility, but 
that he is always humbling himself that he may 
minister to our needs. We have here not an excep- 
tional act, but an example of his common method. 
The delights of the divine wisdom are with the 
sons of men. We cannot grasp our true relation to 
God till we have grasped this fact. Heathenism 
grasped it, but in the guise of polytheism — the 
myriad gods that presided over the myriad acts of 
human life. Modern speculation grasps it, but in 
the form of pantheism — that God is all and in all. 
Christianity alone gets the full truth — the personal 
care of a personal God for all the needs of his crea- 
tures. Let us adore our Lord as he wipes the disci- 
ples' feet, seeing in him God in his constant min- 
istry to us. 



176 MEDITATIONS ON THE APOSTLES' CREED 

Consider, second — 

That humility is really an attribute of greatness. 
Our Lord is humbling himself, not debasing him- 
self. It is a strange idea of greatness to assume 
that it is that which deals with great things. Jesus 
never shows himself more our Lord than precisely 
at such points in his life as this, when the extremity 
of his love and care are revealed. Our own su- 
premacy of life is shown, not in the way we do the 
rare things of great importance that it comes to us 
to deal with — to some of us they never come — but 
in the way in which we order our lives as a whole, 
in the care that we spend on the least details of 
them. Impatience of detail is a mark of littleness : 
of pride, rather than humility. Consider that the 
perfection of any work is a perfection of detail. 
We form a conception of what we have to do, and 
we easily block it out in the large. But to embody 
the intellectual conception perfectly in the material 
form is matter of infinite care in detail. Watch the 
sculptor finishing the statue. Watch the painter 
finishing the portrait. What an infinity of care 
on — I was going to say trifles; but rather on the 
most important part of his work. Is it otherwise 
in human life? The first steps of the spiritual life 
are so easy that we think that we are going to fare 
on to the end without difficulty. But watch the fin- 
ishing of a saint. He has overcome the great 



OUR LORD *77 

temptations, as we are wont to denominate them 
with our false conception of values. But really the 
great temptations are the minute deflections from 
God's will that just spoil the perfection of the char- 
acter. The greatness of our love of God will be 
shown in precisely this minute care not to vary 
from his will at all. 

So let us pray — 

For minute fidelity to God's will. For the hu- 
mility that looks on the least sin as an object of 
care. The fidelity that will not consider our work 
done till all is fashioned after the likeness of the 
Master. Pray for mastery over all life. 

Almighty and Everlasting God, who, of thy ten- 
der love towards mankind, hast sent thy Son, our 
Saviour Jesus Christ, to take upon him our flesh, 
and to suffer death upon the cross, that all mankind 
should follow the example of his great humility ; 
mercifully grant that we may both follow the ex- 
ample of his patience, and also be made partakers 
of his resurrection : through the same Jesus Christ, 
our Lord. 

This title, which seems at first to suggest some 
power — the relation of the ruler and the ruled; to 
bring before one's mind the sweep of an irresistible 
will, dominating and controlling all men; which 



178 MEDITATIONS ON THE APOSTLES' CREED 

seems to come upon us to crush us with the weight 
of omnipotence ; which leaves us stunned and faint- 
ing with the sense of helplessness; becomes filled 
with hope and joy and a sense of intimate personal 
relationship when we note the qualifying presence 
of the pronoun — Our Lord. It is not the unlimited 
power of one who dominates us that comes into 
view, but the influential power that flows from the 
fact that our Lord is the Head of that Body of 
which we all are the members. He is our Lord 
because he is the source of all life and all activity 
an those who, through his redeeming work, have 
been knit into oneness with him. There are other 
words, as we have seen, to express the relation of 
our Lord to the universe, in which he exercises his 
eternal office of Mediator between the Creator and 
the creature ; but under this word we have to think 
of him in his incarnate relation of ruler of those 
whom his sacrificing love has redeemed and gath- 
ered into a living communion with himself. 

We shall be careful then not to think of the rule 
of our Lord as the expression of an external and 
compulsive power. We are apt to picture God's 
rule of us in terms of his rule of the material uni- 
verse ; but there, too, we misconceive the facts when 
we read them as of a universe ruled by laws that 
are imposed upon it from the outside. The real 
laws of the world are the expressions of God's pres- 



OUR LORD 179 

ence in the world, and an exterior God compelling 
inert matter to take certain forms is foreign to the 
Christian conception both of the world and of God. 
If we remember this, we shall not be misled by false 
analogies to mistaken conclusions as to the nature 
of the rule that he exercises over us who are the 
members of his Body. The rule that our Lord 
exercises over us is the expression of his indwelling 
presence. It is not compulsive, though the failure 
to respond to it must have consequences — but the 
influence of his life, which flows out from him the 
Head to us the members. And, therefore, when we 
think of our side of the relation, we think not of 
submission to a ruler but of response to a life. The 
obedience of the Christian is his willing and joyful 
response to the life of Christ which is in him. It 
is said of him that he no longer lives, but Christ 
liveth in him ; that is, his mind and will is so assimi- 
lated to the mind and will of Christ that he re- 
sponds to its impulses and reflects its purpose and 
seeks its ends. We are most of us, no doubt, very 
far from perfect response; perfect response is the 
life of the blessed in heaven ; but such response is 
the ideal of our lives, and we are learning to esti- 
mate our lives in the terms of their response to the 
indwelling Presence. Progress means greater and 
more willing response, and we judge of our distance 
from the ideal, and of our imperfections, by the 



180 MEDITATIONS ON THE APOSTLES' CREED 

difficulty that we have in responding. As we meas- 
ure a force by the resistance it calls forth, so we 
measure the power of sin in our lives by the resist- 
ance our lives make to the will of God. 

We usually express this power theologically in 
terms of grace. But here again we fall into the 
same danger if we do not watch the meaning of our 
words. It is quite possible — many have done so — 
to conceive of grace as an influence emanating from 
God — and we are again in the region of the exter- 
nal. We must hold fast to the fact that, as the 
outcome of the Incarnation, we are united to God 
and God dwells in us with a personal presence. 
Union with God in Christ is the essential fact of 
the Christian life, or what we mean by being in a 
state of grace. 

Grace, then, is the active aspect of this state of 
union ; it is the dynamic presence of God in the soul 
of the Christian. And here again, the life of the 
Christian is the other term of this relationship — it 
is his response to the presence of God. 

This Lordship of Christ expresses itself through 
liis mystical Body ; it is there that we meet with his 
design for our lives, there that our response shows 
itself in the development of Christian character 
and in the obedience of the Christian life. I 
shall consider this response from the point of 
view of obedience, for though it is possible to sep- 



OUR LORD l8l 

arate character and conduct in idea, practically 
they are inseparable, and conduct is only the exter- 
nalisation of character. "By their fruits ye shall 
know them/' The only way we have of judging of 
character is by its embodiments in action. Our atti- 
tude towards the will of our Lord as expressed 
through his Body will suppply us with a sufficient 
working test of our recognition of his Lordship 
over us. 

I do not here discuss the notion of the Church- 
that will come before us later on. For the present 
it is enough to say that the Church is the Body of 
Christ and the sphere of his manifestation. We are 
not concerned with any activities of his outside the 
Body which is constituted by the union with him- 
self and with each other of those whom he has pur- 
chased with his blood and brought into living con- 
tact with himself. Through this Body, he expresses 
his will for men. And our response to this will 
takes the form of loyal obedience. 

There is, in the first place, an ascertained will of 
our Lord which expresses itself through the formu- 
laries of faith. We might consider that faith as a 
system of dogmatic statements which is imposed by 
authority. I do not wish to be understood as deny- 
ing that point of view. But as these meditations are 
not a system of dogmatics, I think for our present 
purpose it will be better to adopt another line of 



182 MEDITATIONS ON THE APOSTLES'' CREED 

approach. Let us look at the formularies as an 
outline statement of the experience of the Christian 
consciousness in regard to Christ and his work. 
This does not claim to be an exhaustive description, 
but it is sufficient for our present purpose. What 
attitude is imposed upon us toward these formular- 
ies by our acknowledgment of Jesus Christ as our 
Lord? 

The importance and meaning of obedience, in any 
case, is, I suppose, to be found in the fact that obe- 
dience is introductory to experience. We impose 
obedience upon children because we know that the 
things we compel them to learn, and which they 
would not learn if left to their own inclinations, will 
become fruitful to them at a later stage of life. We 
meet the boy's impatient, "What is the use of learn- 
ing that?" with the assurance that he will shortly 
find the use of it; that unless he is submissive to 
the guidance of those who know more than he, he 
will most likely pass much of his later life knocking 
at closed doors — doors of which he might have 
brought the keys with him from his previous train- 
ing, but which he impatiently declined to have be- 
cause he did not see their use. The first step to 
any experience of our own is through obedience to 
the experience of those who have gone before. The 
young student who wishes to give himself to the 
work of investigation in any branch of science, 



OUR LORD 



l8 3 



finds the first stages of his intellectual journey made 
easy for him by the work of those who have gone 
before him. He has not to cut out pathways 
through the virgin forests of the world of nature; 
there are already well-trodden roads there. His 
ambition is aroused, his enthusiasm kindled by the 
works of the great masters of science. Their names 
and works, he finds, are held in reverence by all his 
teachers. Even in the case of those whose work 
has been superseded in great degree by the progress 
made since their time, he finds their work esti- 
mated with reference to the circumstances of the 
period in which they lived, and from the point of 
view of whatever positive contribution they made to 
knowledge. He will not anywhere be told that if 
he hopes to make any progress in scientific training, 
he must begin by treating the labours of his prede- 
cessors with contempt, by scorning their experience 
and ridiculing their equipment for their work. He 
will not be told to make a clean sweep of the past 
and begin at the beginning. He will not be told that 
the watchword of the modern method in science is 
''back to Aristotle" — all that lies between is ignor- 
ance and blunder. 

And yet that is much the way in which the be- 
ginner in religion is treated to-day. There is a very 
widely influential phase of religious thought at 
present, which practically asks us to forego all the 



1 &4 CUE LORD 

experiences of the Christian centuries and go back 
to the Gospels, or some fragments of them, and 
build our religion for ourselves out of the materials 
we find there. It will no doubt be objected that 
this is not a fair statement of the case. That what 
is objected to is not experience, but the creedal 
statements built up by philosophy on the basis of 
certain Christian facts. But while this, on the face 
of it looks true, it is not true. The formularies of 
the Church are not the outcome of the cold-blooded 
application of metaphysics to the facts of the Gos- 
pel, but they are the attempt, forced upon the 
Church by the fact that it lives and thinks, to state 
its experience of the Lord in consistent and intelli- 
gible language. The only alternative to develop- 
ment would have been intellectual stagnation. 

If Christians had not thought about the meaning 
of our Lord and his words and acts the Christian 
Church would have been without a Creed ; it would 
have needed none, because it would long ago have 
perished. Let us approach our Creed, then, as the 
formulation of Christian experience ; as educational 
formulae which will open the door of a like experi- 
ence to us. We have not to approach Christ as an 
unknown and mysterious character, concerning 
whom we must first of all formulate some theory; 
we approach him in the light of the experience of 
nearly two thousand years of Christian living. We 



OUR LORD 185 

accept the fact that he is "very God of very God," 
precisely as the young scientist accepts the doctrine 
of evolution, as a formula embodying the experience 
of the past and which will open the door of experi- 
ence to him. I approach religious experience with 
the, if you like, dogmatic prepossession that Jesus 
is God ; and acting on that I find that my experience 
of him as it grows justifies my method of approach. 
I quite agree, as I have said in a preceding medita- 
tion, that the man who stops at dogmatic affirma- 
tions has gained nothing of any significance for life. 
But the very point of the dogmatic affirmation itself 
is that it should point the way to effective action 
which shall issue in assured experience. The ex- 
perience of Christendom is that Jesus is God; and 
the surest way to the personal knowledge of Jesus 
is to start from the formulations of the experience 
of Christendom, and not from the hypothesis that 
Jesus is an unknown quantity the value of which is 
to be sought by independent investigation. 

That attitude which I have just indicated should 
be ours toward all the teaching of the Church. 
Through the Church we approach the Lordship of 
Christ. Loyalty means at least so much ; taking the 
utterances of the Church at their face value and 
honestly using them as our guide in the matter of 
Christian living. The formularies of the Church 
do not block the progress of thought or discourage 



1 86 MEDITATIONS ON THE APOSTLES* CREED 

human progress if they are properly used — used, 
that is, to throw light on the relation of the soul to 
the Saviour and to direct that soul into the way of 
peace. Certainly if the Creeds are to be used as 
handbooks of metaphysics and psychology, not as 
guides of life, the result is likely to be disastrous. 

But the Lordship of Christ exercised through his 
Body makes broader demands upon us than the 
demand that we seek to guide our lives in the light 
of the formularies of faith. There is also required 
of us loyalty towards that part of the Catholic 
Church in which by the providence of God our lives 
are lived. In the present divided state of Christen- 
dom we are members of a particular communion — 
the Church in the United States of America. Or, 
expressing it more broadly, we are members of the 
Anglican Communion ; our allegiance is there ; so 
that we must be loyal. Now, I regret to say, and I 
feel that it ought to be said quite plainly, that no 
part of the Church Catholic has ever had so little 
of loyal service from her children as the Anglican 
Communion gets to-day. I am quite ready to admit 
that in order to be kept in a sound state, any insti- 
tution must be subjected to constant criticism. But 
useful criticism must not be factious and carping. 
There is no doubt that the authorities of the Church 
are kept in a state of doubt and discouragement, 
because, instead of meeting with charitable judg- 



OUR LORD 187 

ment and sympathetic aid, they are subjected to 
constant misjudgment and misrepresentation. And 
this is true, not only of the general government of 
the Church, but of the local government. There is 
the self-will and utter individualism of priests who, 
if things do not go to their mind, will throw up the 
priesthood to which they profess themselves to have 
been called, and denying the grace of the Sacra- 
ments and the truth of their own preaching and 
profession, and leave the communion of that very 
Church which had conferred on them the Christian 
character. There is the utter insubordination of 
some among the laity whose only law is their own 
unregenerate will, who do not hesitate to make the 
work of parishes of none effect if they cannot have 
their own way. There is the weakness of the 
Church in general and the parishes in particular, 
which are hampered in their work and find expan- 
sion impossible because the money of their members 
is spent in mere selfishness or directed to the support 
of institutions and causes which, to say the least, 
have not the claim on their support that the Church 
which gives them their Sacraments has. 

Now none could for a moment assert that the 
Church, looked at from the human side, that is as it 
is an institution confided to men to be carried on, 
is perfect. Its lack of external unity is to be de- 
plored. The deficiencies of its discipline are to be 



1 88 MEDITATIONS ON THE APOSTLES' CREED 

deplored. The deficiencies of its members are to 
be deplored. But it still is true that the way of self- 
will and rebellion is not the way to correct any- 
thing. The deficiencies of the human organization 
can only be corrected and its legitimate work car- 
ried on with success, by the loyal co-operation of all 
its members, and their abandonment of self-will in 
loyally seeking to do the will of their Divine Head. 
Our present state is a lamentable display of the lack 
of what our fathers called "vital piety," and of our 
need of a revival of that piety. 

For what we may call external loyalty will, after 
all, be but the expression of that intimate relation 
to our Lord which is effected by our incorporation 
in him. Christian living is our response to the in- 
fluences that flow to us as the result of our being 
in Christ. And one of the first signs that will mani- 
fest our growth in Christian character will be the 
subsidence of self-will. We shall seek to know 
God's will through the organisation and formularies 
of the Church, or through the answers to our pray- 
ers and the providential guiding of our lievs. This 
will of our Lord for us is an ever-present and ever- 
acting will ; there is no part of our life that is with- 
drawn from it; it touches us everywhere. For the 
most part we shall be unconscious of it, it having 
become habitual for us to obey ; but when our will 
conflicts with it, then it will manifest itself as a 



OUR LORD 189 

certain pressure that we call conscience. That is 
why God's will often seems difficult and obstructive 
of life — because it makes itself felt at the points of 
resistance. We may live twenty-three hours in the 
day in quietude and peace, but the twenty-fourth 
is characterised by sharp struggle, because then our 
will tended to turn from the will of God, and the 
attempt to turn developed the pain of a wounded 
conscience. To any one with Christian ideals obedi- 
ence is an easy thing ; it is disobedience that is hard. 
As Christians living in the obedience of our Lord, 
we become to the world centres of power and light ; 
we transmit the influence of Christ to others. This 
is the method which Christ uses to extend the 
effectiveness of his will. The world seeing that will 
done in us, is attracted to the most beautiful thing 
it knows, the Character of Christ, even by our im- 
perfect reflection of it. And it is not only attracted, 
it is constrained ; constrained by the subtle yet pow- 
erful influence that character always exercises. But 
when we notice that our character has this mission- 
ary vocation, and we set ourselves deliberately to 
increase our influence, as surely we are bound to 
do, we must beware of a danger that is very real. 
The point of departure in making our Lord's will 
effective in the world is not in attempting to domi- 
nate others, but in showing ourselves dominated by 
the will of Christ. There is a certain type of per- 



I90 MEDITATIONS ON THE APOSTLES' CREED 

sonality that seeks to dominate and absorb others; 
to make them over in its own image. You know- 
people who impose themselves — their will, their 
opinions, their religious method — upon you. Their 
ideal, usually quite unconscious, is that you should 
be imitations of them. You must read their books 
and say their prayers and join their societies. 
They have a zeal for God, no doubt ; but their disci- 
ples rarely get beyond them. It is the difficulty of 
parties and schools of thought that they reproduce 
their leaders. But the function of the Christian is 
to reproduce Christ, and so far as his personality is 
an obstructing medium, he is a failure. The virtue 
of our contact with others lies in this, that it spirit- 
ually raises and frees those whom we influence, so 
that they do not take us as standards, but only as 
witnesses of the work of the converting grace of 
God. 

Our Lord's method was not a method of con- 
straint, but of tolerance and patience. We would 
do well to copy that. It will save us much pain and 
disappointment. He accepted the world as he found 
it, without impatience with its obvious defects and 
failures, and set himself to make it a better world. 
I fancy some of us would like to begin with de- 
struction and remaking: but that is not the divine 
method. It is significant that our Lord accepted 
restrictions which he had no need of, because they 



OUR LORD 191 

still had significance and helpfulness for men. He 
submitted himself to the law; he received circum- 
cision and the baptism of John. There is much that 
is suggestive in this attitude. It is a creative not a 
destructive method. It aims at establishing sympa- 
thy that it may attain influence. That may suggest 
much in our dealing with others, in our often im- 
patience with the tolerance of the Church. It is a 
method that declines to entangle itself in useless 
controversies, because it understands that the con- 
troversies will settle themselves when its positive 
work is done. We are liable sometimes — are we 
not? — to assume that vexed and disputed questions 
must be settled before we can go on to positive 
work. We insist on our differences rather than our 
agreements, thus making it often impossible to in- 
fluence those whom we approach with the best 
intentions of helpfulness. 

Perhaps, too, we may apply the same line of 
thought in regard to our spiritual progress. Are 
we not in danger of false methods there? We 
spend so much energy in mere fighting. Face to face 
resistance of temptation and sin we assume is the 
inevitable method. We must win our battle, no 
doubt, but still, one does often feel the helplessness 
of this face to face battle. Is not the more helpful 
method that of building up strength? Those who 
are physically strong are less open to the contagion 



192 MEDITATIONS ON THE APOSTLES' CREED 

of disease. On the whole it is better to gain im- 
munity from infection than to pass one's life trying 
to avoid the places where microbes lurk. So the 
great preventative of sin is spiritual health. Many 
a soul which has tried to overcome temptation till 
it was ready to despair, has found relief by culti- 
vating the positive side of the Christian life, and 
been surprised to find that the old temptation had 
become meaningless. 

There is something of this in conversion, is there 
not? It is the perfectness of our union with our 
Lord that protects us, for through that union our 
life responds to all the motions of his will. 



THE TENTH MEDITATION 



THE TENTH MEDITATION 

WHO WAS CONCEIVED BY 
THE HOLY GHOST 

Let us listen to the words of the Angel — 



XL 



HE Holy Ghost shall come upon thee and 
the power of the Highest shall overshadow 
thee. 



Let us picture to ourselves — 

The scene of the Annunciation, not as some of 
the great artists have conceived it, a princess in a 
noble palace, surrounded by the splendour of roy- 
alty ; but rather as it must have happened, in some 
humble dwelling place bearing all the marks of pov- 
erty. Picture an angel appearing to a maiden. Her 
surprise and confusion must have been overwhelm- 

i9S 



I96 MEDITATIONS ON THE APOSTLES' CREED 

ing; and then, too, quite naturally, she was afraid. 
There was surprise and fear passing into awe- 
smitten wonder as the sense of the angelic message 
crept slowly into her mind — she, Mary of Nazareth, 
chosen to be the instrument of God's mercy to man- 
kind. Pure as she had been all her life long, and 
near to God, she could not have dreamed of such 
nearness as this. One seems to read in her face 
the internal conflict of contending thoughts. Is it 
just a dream, more vivid than any she had ever 
had, but destined to pass as they? Is she really 
standing in an heavenly presence, listening to a 
message from God? Her perplexity breaks out in 
the words, "How can this be?" One feeling we 
may be sure was absent, joy. That might come 
later ; but now only fear and perplexity. Yes ; in a 
moment, one thing else : perfect submission to the 
will of God. "Behold the handmaid of the Lord; 
"be it unto me even as thou wilt." And 'the angel 
departed from her leaving her to her thoughts, and 
a new sense of the nearness of God. 

Consider, first — 

What is actually taking place here. In the womb 
of the Virgin, God and man are uniting — uniting 
forever. It is the moment of the Incarnation. Let 
us in silence adore God and the God-man and the 
Holy Ghost. 



WHO WAS CONCEIVED BY THE HOLY GHOST 1 97 

The second Person of the Blessed Trinity is as- 
suming humanity to himself becomes the new life 
of humanity. As his instrument in this mighty 
work he has chosen the weak things of the world. 
From the outset he exposes himself and his Blessed 
Mother and his work to the reproach of man. He 
seems to place himself at a quite unnecessary dis- 
advantage and make his work both more difficult 
of accomplishment from his side, and on our side 
more difficult of acceptance, than it need have been. 
But consider that this is the usual divine method — 
to raise difficulties that shock the reason and can 
only be overcome by faith. The methods of the 
Holy Spirit are comprehensible only by those who 
by communion with him have attained to spiritual 
discernment. He must come upon us, too, and 
overshadow us, and impart to us the gift of heavenly 
wisdom ere we can follow him in the revealed 
methods of his operation. Is it our experience that 
the mysteries of the Spirit's working are becoming 
plain to us, or are we still, as at the beginning of 
our walk, beset with doubt and difficulty ? Has our 
spiritual life been indeed accompanied by an unfold- 
ing of the mind of the Spirit, an increase in spir- 
itual discernment ? Do the acts of God which once, 
perchance, were stumbling blocks, seem to us now 
the natural and, indeed, the inevitable methods of 
God? 



I98 MEDITATIONS ON THE APOSTLES' CREED 

Consider, second — 

How intimately we are concerned in this act of 
God. It is not some miracle occurring in a far-off 
time of which we read and which we accept be- 
cause it is related in the documents of our religion. 
God is still Incarnate, and the effects of that Incar- 
nation are manifest in us. In a real sense, Christ 
is being formed in us by the operation of the Holy 
Ghost. Our regeneration which took us up into 
Christ and made us the children of God was his 
operation. Christ is being formed in us day by day. 
The mind of Christ is being made known to us. 
All our spiritual life springs out of this primary 
operation of the Holy Ghost whereby God and man 
became one in the womb of Mary. Do we keep in 
mind this ever-present action of the Holy Ghost in 
our lives? The qualities that we acquire that ex- 
press the vitality of our religious life are called by 
St. Paul the fruits of the Spirit — love, joy, peace 
and the rest. This thought of a religion as a pro- 
cess whereby something permanent is being formed, 
rather than as a series of unrelated acts of obedi- 
ence to rule or law, is of great significance. The 
spiritual man is not the carnal man with a new set 
of habits, but he is a new creation by the operation 
of the Holy Ghost. Christ is forming us; not an 
imitation of Christ, but that alter Christus that is a 



WHO WAS CONCEIVED BY THE HOLY GHOST 1 99 

member of Christ because he lives by the same life 
being partaker of his nature. Is Christ being 
formed in me? Are there signs of conformity to 
him evident in my life? Have I escaped from the 
life of rules to the life of union ? 

Let us pray, then — 

That the Holy Ghost shall so come on us that 
Christ shall be formed in us. Pray to live in the 
shadow of the Highest. 

Grant, we beseech thee, Almighty God, that the 
splendour of thy brightness may shine upon us, 
and the light of thy Light confirm with the illumi- 
nation of the Holy Spirit the hearts of those who 
have been born again through thy grace: for the 
sake of Jesus Christ, our Lord. 

• •••••» 

In the Incarnation of the Son of God humanity 
is raised to the fruition of that which had been 
God's thought for it in the very fact of its creation. 
Here, for the first time, creation becomes intelli- 
gible. All that long history of creative develop- 
ment which modern science describes for us, is 
but a stupefying and terrifying mystery, "the 
dream of an insane god," if we cannot escape from 
the limitations to which science confines us. The 
history of human society, as read in terms of ma- 
terialism, has been depicted for us in the pages of 



200 MEDITATIONS ON THE APOSTLES CREED 

a very brilliant and very cynical French writer 
who conceives the social process as an endless series 
of circles. Man rises by the gradual accumulation 
of knowledge and skill to the height of material 
civilisation, only to find that this civilisation gener- 
ates forces that are destructive of it, and send man 
back to his original savagery. From this he rises 
by the same slow struggle only to meet the same 
disaster. Humanity is a tennis ball driven from 
one end of the court to the other through eternity. 
Worlds rise and go through their process of devel- 
opment and decay and the whole process and every 
stage of it is meaningless. 

The Incarnation is like a sunrise before which 
the shadows flee away. By it the terrifying dreams 
of the night of our ignorance are dissipated. Hu- 
man progress is not to be conceived in the likeness 
of a stream dashing from its fountain source down 
the mountain side, and, gathering strength as it 
goes from its union with other streams, flowing 
out joyfully into the plain only to lose itself in the 
desert sands. We watch the career of some man 
of splendid intellectual and moral power. We see 
him year after year gathering knowledge and ex- 
perience and putting them to the highest uses; we 
see his ripened wisdom becoming ever more fruit- 
ful for good in the society that he influences; and 
then he is stricken down and dies. If that is the 



WHO WAS CONCEIVED BY THE HOLY GHOST 201 

end of that man, we say, life is a hideous night- 
mare. You have but to magnify the facts till they 
become, not the history of an individual, but of 
humanity, to see the awful tragedy that human his- 
tory is if we are obliged to read it in the sense of 
materialism. But the Incarnation gives it another 
meaning, shows the evolutionary process, ending, 
not in final catastrophy, but in the taking of man- 
hood into God's ; shows us the beginning of a new 
process in the birth of the new creation and the 
setting up of the new kingdom, the final issues of 
which we can only dimly infer from the glory of 
its beginnings. 

In the womb of the Virgin, Creator and creature, 
God and man, are united externally — and this to 
which creation had looked and is its meaning, is in 
its turn, not an end but a beginning. That which 
has borne the image of the earthly, shall also bear 
the image of the heavenly. Humanity united to 
God in Christ is humanity raised to its highest 
capacity. It shows in the Incarnate life the possi- 
bilities of humanity united with God. 

Here is Christ, in a unique and not to be repeated 
manner, by the union of the divine and human na- 
tures in the Person of the Son of God ; but in that 
very closeness of union, endowing the human na- 
ture which has been so exalted, with capacity to 
be the means of approach through which all human 



202 MEDITATIONS ON THE APOSTLES' CREED 

nature may be made partaker of the divine. From 
the Incarnate Lord flows forth that Fountain of 
Life whereof we may all be partakers, and by par- 
taking of which we are united with him and with 
each other in the intimate communion of eternal 
life. This is that mystery of godliness which 
chases the shadows from the earth and frees man 
from the power of pessimistic despair. 

But, it will be said, if this proclaiming of the 
Incarnation of God opens vistas of radiant hope to 
those who can receive it, to others it raises intel- 
lectual difficulties that seem insuperable. For men 
who are accustomed to weigh facts that are alleged 
to them in the indifferent scales of their producible 
evidence, it is hard to accept the Incarnation as a 
fact of human history. For them the very terms of 
the statement put it in the region of fantastic 
dreams. It shares the weakness of all miraculous 
and supernatural actions in that it cannot be sub- 
mitted to the ordinary tests by which evidence 
must be weighed. The fact that it would lighten 
the burden that rests on us if it were true, does 
not justify us in assuming that it is true. 

I may say, in passing, that that last sentence 
seems to me to contain a great fallacy of method. 
It seems to me that as humanity is in great spir- 
itual and intellectual straits before the mystery of 
the universe, it not only has the right, but the duty 



WHO WAS CONCEIVED BY THE HOLY GHOST 203 

to commit itself to the guidance of an hypothesis 
which promises help. What else are all the philoso- 
phies of the world Are they not hypotheses that 
men think helpful and by the aid of which they 
attempt to solve the secrets of the universe and of 
human life? 

What is progress in thought, but thus seeking 
helpful hypotheses and successively gathering from 
them for permanent usefulness so much of them 
as experience will justify? 

Why should we not therefore ask men in whose 
minds the Incarnation raises difficulties that they 
cannot solve, to lay aside the difficulty and trust 
themselves to the guidance of the Incarnate Life in 
the hope that the honest and earnest living of it 
may produce an experience in the light of which the 
intellectual difficulties that the union of God and 
man in the Person of Christ raises, may be dis- 
solved. This is the continual plea of Christianity : 
Test me, if you will, to the uttermost; but test me 
in the only way in which I can be rightly tested, by 
the test of life. And aside from my demand for 
this practical test made in the name of common 
justice, I offer this evidence : that millions of human 
beings through the course of nearly two thousand 
years, under all diversities of human life, and in 
all stages of human culture, have so tested me and 
not found me wanting. This is not the testimony 



204 MEDITATIONS ON THE APOSTLES CREED 

of antiquity; it is the testimony of your contempo- 
raries, of your friends and companions. They have 
lived and are living in the strength of the Incarnate 
Life. The experience that those millions assert, 
that they have of Incarnate God, does justify any 
man in acting upon the hypothesis of the truth of 
the Incarnation, whatever of intellectual difficulty 
he may find in the statement of the doctrine. 

And is the individual difficulty as great as we are 
accustomed to assume? It is not ultimately a diffi- 
culty with the nature of the evidence — the testi- 
mony of prophecy, or the credibility of the Gospel 
narratives — it is really the difficulty which gets in 
the way of the acceptance of any fact that is mirac- 
ulous. Miracles are unintelligible, we are told, and 
any event that involves the miraculous is unac- 
ceptable in a world of material cause and effect — ■ 
a world whose laws we find to be uniform. 

Let us look for a moment at the opposition to 
the miraculous. If a man does not believe in God, 
naturally we have no common ground from which 
to discuss the miraculous. But if a man believe in 
God, and a God who is alive and not a philosophi- 
cal formula, I cannot see on what ground he should 
object that miracles are contrary to the order of 
nature. To do so, he must assume nature to be 
some sort of a system, self-existent, and apart from 
God. Otherwise, believing as Christians believe, 



WHO WAS CONCEIVED BY THE HOLY GHOST 205 

that the natural world is but one sphere of the 
divine manifestations, there can be no objection to 
miracles but their unusualness and defect of evi- 
dence and their occurrence in the midst of a sys- 
tem of uniform laws as phenomena depending on no 
known causation. I think all these assumptions 
may be successfully disputed. For one thing, they 
involve an assumption that our knowledge of the 
universe is exhaustive and that therefore we are 
competent to say what does and what does not fall 
outside its "laws." I am entirely unprepared to 
admit the legitimacy of any such assumption and 
to allow that miraculous action is lawless action in 
any other sense than that of dependence upon laws 
unknown to us. To describe an event as miracu- 
lous is to describe it as unaccountable from the 
point of view of a very limited experience, as man's 
experience must be admitted to be. 

But there is another method of approach which 
seems to me to remove much of the difficulty still 
felt in regard to the miraculous by those who be- 
lieve in God as an active power in the universe. 
Their feeling in the matter may perhaps be roughly 
expressed in the dictum, "Miracles do not happen." 
This world as we know it is non-miraculous. If it 
has ever been otherwise, why should it have 
changed? The arguments advanced for the alleged 
cessation of miracles are in no degree convincing. 



206 MEDITATIONS ON THE APOSTLES'' CREED 

If it was ever a necessary method of divine action 
there is no reason to be seen why it is not so now. 
This is felt to contain strong objections to most 
miracles even by many of those who make an ex- 
ception in the case of the Incarnation and the Res- 
urrection. 

Now under the general connotation of the mirac- 
ulous, I include all supernatural actions, i. e., all 
actions which seem to be independent upon material 
laws. And from that point of view I would trav- 
erse the assertion that "Miracles do not happen." 
If they do not — if there is not a constant action of 
God on the world and especially upon the souls of 
men, then I shall have to range myself with the 
doubters. But if I at all understand the meaning 
of Christianity, it involves the assertion that mira- 
cles happen all the time ; that it has been continually 
conscious in the whole course of its history of the 
living presence of God producing results that would 
not and could not have been produced by the laws 
of the material world so far as we know them. It 
is this uniform experience of Christendom of the 
action of God within and upon it, sometimes in 
forms purely spiritual as in conversion and the 
operation of grace, and sometimes in mixed forms, 
that it, forms in which both matter and spirit are 
involved, as in the healing of the sick and in an- 
swers to prayer — is a constant fact, indeed the pri- 



.WHO WAS CONCEIVED BY THE HOLY GHOST 207 

mary fact of its experience, that removes from my 
mind all theoretical difficulty in regard to the mira- 
cles of the past. No doubt, as individual events 
they have to be estimated by their evidence and 
their relation to the person of the performer. 

Let us turn away from this perhaps rather arid 
discussion, to the thought of our personal relation 
to the Incarnation. The Incarnation of the Son of 
God was wrought by the power of the Holy Ghost. 
It is the power of the Holy Ghost, too, that is 
effective in us, working the union that is between 
us and Incarnate God. It is through his continual 
work that Christ is being formed in us. Over and 
over again we meet in the New Testament descrip- 
tions of the life of the Christian in terms of its 
union with Christ, which imply that that union is 
the result of the extension of the Incarnate life of 
Christ in such wise that he lives in the believer. 
Christ lives in us, we live, yet not we, but Christ 
liveth in us. We are raised to sit with him in 
heavenly places. We are to grow into the perfect 
man, the measure of the stature of the fulness of 
Christ. Do we ever make any real attempt to 
grasp these sayings as descriptive of ourselves and 
try to correlate them with our own experience? 
However unusual they may at times seem as de- 
scriptions of us who live enmeshed in the activities 
and distractions of our social life, yet they are 



208 MEDITATIONS ON THE APOSTLES' CREE J 

true of us just so far as we have a vital, personal 
spiritual experience. And it is of the very utmost 
importance to the growth of that experience that 
we should hold steadily before us that wherein our 
true Christian character consists — its realised union 
with Incarnate God. It is sad to know how many 
good men and women to-day are missing the cen- 
tral meaning of Christianity, and indeed giving up 
Christianity altogether, just because of this failure 
to grasp its true significance. Many of those who 
suppose themselves to be the exponents of Chris- 
tianity to-day have, in their anxiety to remove from 
it all that can offend and be a stumbling block to 
the natural man, ended by reducing it to a system 
which has no vital significance whatever, which 
may be rightly reckoned as but one of the multi- 
tude of forms of human thought. But Christianity 
is not a new knowledge or a new formulation of 
the old problems that have haunted and vexed men 
from the foundation of the world. It is not a new 
morality seeking to set human life on a more satis- 
factory basis and solve our social problems. It 
cannot be evaporated into a proclamation of the 
brotherhood of man. It is not a new revelation of 
conduct in terms of the Fatherhood of God. Chris- 
tianity is a new life, the introduction into humanity 
of a vital principle that flows from the union with 
God and is rendered operative by the action of the 



WHO WAS CONCEIVED BY THE HOLY GHOST 209 

Holy Spirit, who reveals to man his destiny, as 
God's child, to live eternally in union with his 
Father. 

Let us beware of those pitfalls which would re- 
duce Christianity to an insignificant thing under 
the guise of making it easier of acceptance and 
more serviceable to human life. I know no good 
reason for supposing that religion should be easy 
of intellectual acceptance ; that it should present no 
difficulties that the human mind must conquer be- 
fore it can accept it. Religion as involving a rela- 
tion with God needs must deal with matters that 
are beyond human understanding. As an assertion 
of the claims of God on human life it calls for the 
submission of the intellect as well as of the will. It 
does not call for the abandonment of the intellect; 
but for its willing submission to the conditions un- 
der which alone it can be fruitfully used in dealing 
with the relations between God and man established 
by the Incarnation. Those conditions limit it on 
the speculative side — man might long ago have con- 
vinced himself that by speculations he would not 
find God; but it leaves it free on the appreciative 
side to occupy itself in the study and appropriation 
of the truth of God as far as God has made himself 
known. As free speculation is one of the things 
that man claims as a right, he needs to be warned 
that it is excluded from the field of religion; that 



2IO MEDITATIONS ON THE ATOSTLF., CRFED 

the product of free speculation on God and the 
universe is not religion but philosophy. Religion 
gains, no doubt, from the existence of free specula- 
tion. Speculative criticism compels it to realise its 
limits as religion and keep its own bounds. 

Nor is religion more serviceable in proportion as 
it is "simplified." It is possible so far to simplify 
religion that it ceases to perform any service that 
could not be better performed by some other agency. 
As social or ethical impulse it is only encumbered, 
and is felt to be encumbered, by its supernatural 
equipment. It is avowedly on the ground that the 
supernaturalism of the Church cripples the effect- 
iveness of its social mission that we are urged to 
throw over the supernatural altogether. And if its 
social mission is the essential thing about the Chris- 
tian Church, it will be wise to accept the invitation. 
But so long as we believe that the whole meaning 
of the Christian religion is to bring man into union 
with God and that his effective social action is a 
necessary product of that relation and not some- 
thing independent of it that can be equally well 
carried on without it, we shall feel that instead of 
abandoning or minimising the supernatural we shall 
stress it more and more. 

Let us shun then the danger that is ever present 
of seeking to live our lives on the natural level 
inspired by natural motives. I am convinced that 



WHO WAS CONCEIVED BY THE HOLY GHOST 211 

there are many who do so live — whose religion is 
a set of observances tacked, awkwardly enough, 
upon a set of commonplace conventional rules which 
are the real guides of their actions. For the most 
part they are not very conscious of the incoherence 
of their lives. They are not conscious that their 
religion is in danger of becoming the merest for- 
malism. The trouble develops, however, when they 
are tempted to make some change in their conduct, 
from habits that they once thought Christian to 
those which they have thought not so ; and, as they 
say, "they do not see why" they should not. That 
reveals the rift. If you do not "see why" one line 
of conduct is Christian and another is not, it can 
only be because your conduct in this respect has 
never been consciously related to Christianity at 
all. In such a case it is doubtful if you really have 
any conduct that you can call your own ; what you 
have is probably the imitation of some one else's 
conduct. If we are living by Christian principles, 
we certainly ought to be able to see the relation of 
them to our religion as a whole, and to appreciate 
the reason why one sort of conduct is Christian and 
another not ; we should probably be spared much of 
doubt and difficulty if we were to stop asking what 
rule forbids this or enjoins that, and referred our 
questions of conduct to the test of Christian con- 
sistency ; the test, I mean, of their consonance with 



212 MEDITATIONS ON THE APOSTLES CREED 

the ideals of the Christian life. Christians ought 
hardly to need any other guide than this. 

A supernatural life will not maintain itself in us 
without our co-operation. It has its normal means 
of sustenance, neglect of which ends in atrophy or 
death. It is a communion, and a communion means 
the intermingling of two lives. It means from our 
JLord's side constant action; it means that on ours, 
our souls are now open and attent to the influences 
that flow from him. We know that our lives are 
going on well so long as we find in ourselves a 
ready response to these influences; the eagerness 
with which our lives go out in response to the reve- 
lation of God's will, the joy that is ours when we 
feel that obedience is growing easier to us, and that 
we have fixed in our characters some small likeness 
to him. As we go on we find that the things 
that once seemed of such absorbing interest to us 
that we could not conceive that we could ever do 
without them, have lost their attractiveness; we 
sacrifice them, we say, and yet it now hardly seems 
a, sacrifice. We find the self-limitation that we 
thought was going to be so hard as we watched it 
from a distance and felt that the time was coming 
when it must be made, a simple and natural thing 
to do. We find that we can do without a great 
many things because we possess the one thing ; and 
we begin to understand the once mysterious mer- 



WHO WAS CONCEIVED BY THE HOLY GHOST 213 

chantman who sold all he had for a single flawless 
pearl. It was such a wonderful thing — the pearl. 
And now we have it too, and all else is nothing. 

"We gather violets because the skies 
Are far beyond our reach; but if a star 
Came down to us with sweet fire over-brimmed, 
We might forget the simple violets." 

"These things are too great for us and over- 
whelm us. Great saints may live in the thought of 
their union with our blessed Lord ; but we, just or- 
dinary folk, are not able to do that. I feel at 
moments as though I were lifted to some mount of 
vision and caught a distant glimpse of that life, but 
I am soon down in the valley once more where the 
mists hang, and I cannot see the mountain, still less 
the vision." Ah ! But the significant thing is that 
you have seen it once. Once the traveller on the 
mountain peak sees the mists of the valley break 
and the sun strike upon the fields where lies his 
journey's end, the mists may close as they will, and 
the night may fall and the storm break, but he is not 
troubled, because what he has seen, thought it be 
but once, he knows is there and awaits him. And if 
in your intensest moments of prayer and communion 
the sense of the nearness of our Lord and of your 
communion with him comes to you, it is not ren- 
dered doubtful by the fact that other moments come 
in which you miss the vision. It is a reality, though 



214 MEDITATIONS ON THE APOSTLES CREED 

the clouds mostly hide it. And if you are true to 
it, they will hide it less and less as life goes on. For, 
all unperceived, our Lord is uniting himself closer 
and closer to the soul that wills to have him, and 
the hour will come when his presence will be known 
by the mastery that he has gained over your life. 
After long, and as it seems, fruitless struggle, that 
will one day come to you as the breaking of dreams. 
You will awake, and it will be to find yourself after 
his likeness and you will be satisfied. 



THE ELEVENTH MEDITATION 



THE ELEVENTH MEDITATION 

BORN OF THE VIRGIN MARY 
Let us listen to the words of the prophet — 



3 



EHOLD, a virgin shall conceive, and bear 
a son, and shall call his name Immanuel. 



Let us picture — 

Isaiah the prophet before King Ahaz. The king 
has just made his final choice — the choice to rely 
on earthly power rather than on the power of the 
Lord God. He declines even to ask for a sign that 
shall certify the words of the prophet. As between 
confiding himself and his kingdom to God or to 
statecraft, he will have statecraft. He will trust to 
his carefully planned alliances. They rest on a 
comprehensible basis of facts ; what Isaiah asks him 
217 



2l8 MEDITATIONS ON THE APOSTLES' CREED 

is to play the part of a religious enthusiast. They 
are in striking contrast, these two men, as they 
stand there at the end of the conduit of the upper 
pool in the highway of the fuller's field. One rep- 
resents the wisdom that is the outcome of a careful 
study of the political situation; the other the wis- 
dom that rests on divine vision. Isaiah is all eager- 
ness, urging Ahaz to risk all on an act of faith. "It 
is God's kingdom and you are God's representative," 
he seems to say. "Throw yourself in complete 
faith on God and he will rescue you; ask a sign 
that shall prove the truth of my words/* We see 
the smile of contempt on the lips of Ahaz, the smile 
of the man who despises religious enthusiasm. "I 
will not ask, neither will I tempt the Lord." Isaiah 
turns away ; he forgets Ahaz and his eyes look out 
into the far future. He turns from the man who 
will not be a deliverer to the Deliverer whom the 
Lord himself shall raise up to rescue Israel. "The 
virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and shall call 
his name Immanuel." It will come in the far future, 
but it will come. "For unto us a child is born, unto 
us a son is given : and the government shall be upon 
his shoulder : and his name shall be called Wonder- 
ful, Counsellor, the mighty God, The everlasting 
Father, The Prince of Peace." 



BORN OF THE VIRGIN MARY 219 

Consider, first — 

That this contrast, so vivid here, is permanent. 
Humanity groups itself on one or the other side of 
this line that separates Ahaz and Isaiah. On this 
side, all the keen, cautious men of limited view, 
who guide themselves by the dictates of merely 
human probabilities; who walk by sight, not faith. 
On that side, are the men of faith, eager, enthusi- 
astic, fanatical, who will risk all in reliance on what 
they believe to be the will of God. To the one to 
risk the issues of life on conduct guided by alleged 
revelations and miracles is the wildest superstition ; 
to the other it is the highest sanity. To the one, 
the words of Christ are to be judged, and accepted 
or rejected, as they seem to embody a workable 
theory of life not because of any supernatural ori- 
gin or mission that may be ascribed to the author. 
To the other, it is precisely his supernatural origin 
and mission that give his words their meaning and 
force. To the one, the virgin birth of Christ is a 
difficulty that must be overcome or set aside before 
they can accept his teaching; to the other, it is a 
light that illumines all his utterances and lets us 
see his secret. 

Consider, second — 

That we are committed to such action as arises 
out of supernatural facts. We believe in an Incar- 



220 MEDITATIONS ON THE APOSTLES'' CREED 

nate God born of a virgin mother. We are Chris- 
tians, not in spite of the virgin birth, the difficulties 
of which we manage to get along with or avoid in 
some way, but because of that birth which is the 
very corner-stone of our faith. We believe, not 
because our Lord's teaching approves itself to the 
dictates of human reason, but because it makes 
known to us the mind of God and declares his will. 
God who thus manifests his love in giving himself 
for us commands our allegiance and love in a way 
that a mere appeal to reason could not do. So we 
come to kneel before the child Jesus as he rests in 
the arms of his Holy Mother, finding in him the 
realisation of the words of the prophet, — His name 
shall be called Immanuel — God with us. 

Let us pray, then — 

For willingness of faith in accepting all the rev- 
elation of God. Pray for the readiness of St. 
Mary : "Be it unto me according to thy word." 

Grant, O Lord, we beseech thee, to thy people an 
inviolable firmness of faith; that as we confess 
thine Only Begotten Son, the everlasting partaker 
of thy glory, to have been born in our very flesh, 
of the Virgin Mother, they may be delivered from 
present adversities, and admitted into the joys that 
shall abide; through the same Jesus Christ our 
Lord. 



BORN OF THE VIRGIN MARY 221 

The child-bearing of Mary is a subject to be ap- 
proached with a certain reticence. There are 
themes of which silence is the best method of treat- 
ment. And here there would seem to be small need 
of discussion because the evidence that we have to 
go upon is of necessity such as cannot be tested by 
any of the ordinary methods of testing evidence. 
We have the story of the Annunciation and its at- 
tendant circumstances in the Gospel. Whether we 
put them aside as incredible or accept them with 
all their implications, will depend upon, not the 
evidence for their truth, but on our general attitude 
toward the preceding facts of the Creed. I sup- 
pose that any one who can say the Creed up to 
this point will have no difficulty in going on. The 
fact of the Virgin Birth will hardly be a stumbling 
block to any one who believes in the Incarnation. 

Into the relation of the Holy Mother and the 
Divine Child we will not presume to enter. The 
relations of any mother and any child are too sa- 
cred for that. One feels that here one may best 
follow the wise reticence of the Scriptures. Only 
we may emphasise the unbounded love that made 
the relation of Jesus and Mary one of unbroken 
joy. What must that nearness and intimacy of 
God's presence have meant of joy and peace dur- 
ing all the months of the child-bearing and years 
of the infancy before the shadow of the cross fell 



222 MEDITATIONS ON THE APOSTLES'* CREED 

upon her. In our own broken experience, we do 
know moments when the communion of our souls 
with the present God fills us with peace and joy 
and confidence. We seem for the moment to have 
surmounted the ordinary obstacles to communion 
and to have passed almost to the state of vision. 
Our Lord makes hfo presence evident to us and we 
eagerly speak whV him. Thus we feel, as the 
apostles felt on the Mount of Transfiguration, the 
pleading desire to stay the hurrying moments and 
to hold the Presence yet a little longer. There are 
hours when our hearts burn within us with some 
subtle, mysterious warmth; moments whose joy of 
possession is shadowed by the sense of coming sep- 
aration, and we cling to our Lord and beg that he 
will abide with us yet a while. We cannot but feel 
that these moments are but faulty interpretations 
of the sustained joy of Mary, between whose pure 
soul and communion with the present God there 
was no bar. Let it be that she was far from under- 
standing the full significance of her Child ; still the 
very mystery that surrounded his conception would 
have been constantly suggestive of the wonderful 
favour of God. The Holy Spirit that came upon her 
did not leave her; but there would be his indwell- 
ing and stimulating and hallowed presence too : — 
"Hail, thou that art highly favoured, the Lord is 
with thee ; blessed art thou among women." If we 



BORN OF THE VIRGIN MARY 223 

have thought our way into the heart of those words 
we have caught some faint notion of the joy that 
they implied for the Blessed Mother. If when we 
ourselves have received our Blessed Lord in the 
Mystery of the Altar we have become conscious of 
his Presence, though but for a moment, we have 
known something of the intimacy of the relation of 
Mary and our Lord. 

And all the while, not very far in the background 
of this mystery of joy and communion, there is that 
other great mystery, the mystery of suffering. I 
have not much sympathy with the thought of those 
who would have us believe that Mary was spared 
the pain of child-bearing. Pain, whatever its ulti- 
mate meaning, is so intimately knit up with love, 
especially with the love of those to whom with any 
reality we give ourselves, that it seems a part of 
the love itself. One feels it difficult to conceive 
love without the background of pain and sacrifice. 
There is, indeed, an intensification of the love when 
we have to sacrifice ourselves for it, when we find 
in it the call and opportunity for sacrifice. Our 
notions of pain are all wrong because we so habitu- 
ally read it in terms of resentment and unwilling- 
ness. But there is pain that we voluntarily accept 
— as our Lord accepted the pain of the Cross — a 
pain that is brimming with blessing and without 
which we should feel our life all the weaker in 



224 MEDITATIONS ON THE APOSTLES' CREED 

power. Such was the pain of Calvary, such is the 
pain of all who are very near God. Clearer spir- 
itual insight, deeper penetration into life, means in- 
creased capacity for suffering. So the sword went 
through the heart of Mary just because God had 
brought her so near to himself. 

Pain is the enrichment of life; to be without it 
would be to be without much of joy, too. There 
are things in the world about us that we think we 
might well dispense with because we are ignorant 
of their office and judge them from a narrowly 
personal point of view. There is nothing that 
seems more useless, more mere annoyance, than 
dust — the dust that blows about our streets, the 
soot that rises from chimneys, the barren sand- 
storm that sweeps across the desert. But without 
dust we should be without the pleasant showers 
that refresh the earth; the condensation of water 
in the air requires the presence of immense num- 
bers of dust particles about which to condense. 
Without these it would only condense at a lower 
temperature and we should live in an atmosphere 
of moisture with a different earth. The deep blue 
of the sky, which is one of the constant joys of our 
life, the glow of the sunset sky, when all the west 
is lit with orange and red and gold, the blue haze 
that wraps the mountains — all these exist because 
of the presence of atmospheric dust. Without it 



BORN OF THE VIRGIN MARY 225 

there would be no twilight, no afterglow, no glory 
of the evening sky. It is so in life — take out the 
hard things that we fret against, and there would 
go with them many of the beauties and joys of life 
itself ; it would be the poorer, the less worth living ; 
there would go much of its tenderness, its sympa- 
thy, its power of sacrifice, its ecstacy of self-sur- 
render. In another world, where there will be no 
more pain, its office will doubtless be supplied by 
something other ; but here it is a form of our min- 
istry, an added glory to our vocation, that we can 
suffer for and with God and each other. Mazzini 
said : "The highest call that comes to a young man 
is, 'Come and suffer.' " 

If sorrow falls 
Take comfort still in deeming there may be 
A way to peace on earth by woes of ours. 

The method that God chose of uniting himself 
with humanity, the method of Nazareth and Beth- 
lehem, may give us insight to this work of God. 
He hath chosen the weak things of the world. It 
is the weakness of the Incarnation that has aston- 
ished and scandalised the world. Men have strange 
notions of the way in which it was becoming that 
God should work; they are continually looking for 
the spectacular from him: "Behold, I thought he 
would come forth and call upon the name of his 
God and strike his hand on the place and recover 



2 26 MEDITATIONS ON THE APOSTLES' CREED 

the leper." But that was not the method at all. 
The Jew, notwithstanding all the teaching of the 
prophets, had arrived at a spectacular notion of the 
coming of Messiah, and it was a rock of offence 
that he came from despised Galilee. A Messiah at 
the head of irresistible armies, shattering all the 
powers of the world, was conceivable ; but a cruci- 
fied Messiah ! In the narratives of the Temptation 
Satan is displayed with the same notion: — Cast 
thyself down — receive kingdoms. The work of 
God men would have in dramatic setting. The 
same notion haunts modern thought. How aften 
do we meet in anti-Christian writing the notion of 
the importance of man and of Christianity treated 
with contempt on the ground of the insignificance 
of the earth. That God should be conceived to 
care particularly for so small a planet — of so small 
a solar system is incredible. The inference we are 
left to make is that if God could be conceived to 
interfere at all in the affairs of the universe, he 
would at least have chosen a large star. But some 
one has pertinently asked: "How large ought a 
planet to be in order that we may conceive it to be 
interesting to God ?" Of course there is a hopeless 
confusion of values here. But it marks the human 
astonishment at God's choice of the weak rather 
than the strong. But in all his working there is a 
hiding of his power. He does not compel men or 



BORN OF THE VIRGIN MARY 227 

overwhelm them. What more striking display of 
this than the Sacraments? Where will you find 
less apparent adaptation of means to end? Think 
of a baptism. It is usually not a very inspiring 
scene — the pouring of a little water on a baby's 
head, with the accompaniment of a few words, 
seems of little significance ; and then the priest pro- 
nounces astonishing words : "Seeing that this child 
is regenerate and grafted into the Body of Christ's 
Church." A priest speaks a few words over bread 
and wine and then comes to you and says : "The 
Body of our Lord Jesus Christ — the Blood of our 
Lord Jesus Christ." We can understand the in- 
credulous wonder of men. But that is the method 
of God. That is his method even in the birth of 
Jesus. This helpless baby in his manger-cradle is 
the Lord of heaven and earth. All our hope here 
and ever hangs on him. We watch him later when 
he has passed through the ordinary stages of hu- 
man growth and experience, entering on his min- 
istry, teaching the crowds, submitting to rejection 
and scorn and insult and death. It is still the 
method of weakness — there is still a hiding of his 
power. We watch the history of his Church and 
it is still the method of drawing men by love and 
sympathy and the spirit of weakness. We feel sure 
of the fidelity of the Church to its Master and Head 
as we watch it threading the times of persecution, 



228 MEDITATIONS ON THE APOSTLES' CREED 

accepting suffering and insult and death as its nor- 
mal lot; we begin to have doubts of the Church 
precisely in those periods in which it becomes tri- 
umphant and takes to itself the wrappings of roy- 
alty and puts its foot on the neck of kings. We 
find then that whatever its apparent strength and 
success, it is a failure in its essential mission to 
present to men the winning character of Jesus of 
Nazareth, the meek and lowly. 

And if we have grasped the divine method we 
feel that profound truth that St. Paul enunciates: 
"When I am weak, then am I strong." The char- 
acter that embodies the Christ-ideal is the strong- 
est character that humanity knows. St. Francis is 
the strongest character of the Middle Ages. The 
saints are the strongest men and women of our 
race. They have found the secret of the life that 
has the widest contact with the universe — the life 
that is hid with Christ in God. They are strong 
because they have found the secret of the life of 
Jesus; that strength is not compulsive power but 
sympathetic love which willingly gives itself for 
others. Napoleon said: "I can gain but a waver- 
ing influence over the men whose eyes and ears I 
can catch. This Man — vanished for eighteen cen- 
turies — still holds the characters of men as in a 
vise." But the point is that he had not vanished — 
but that he lives and perpetually reproduces the 



BORN OF THE VIRGIN MARY 229 

qualities of his character in his followers. He would 
have been forgotten had it not been for that. As 
the mere history of a life, Chirstianity would have 
been of no worth. It lives by the constant repro- 
duction of a life. Because Christ is formed in his 
saints to the extent of their capacity to reproduce 
him, Christianity lives. It lives not by its doctrinal 
tradition, but by its character tradition. This is the 
ground of its persistence, the secret of its ever re- 
newing strength. 

The ability of the Church to meet the demands 
of its mission is its ability to produce men who 
learn from it the secret of Jesus. When it ceases 
to make the production of such men and women 
its chief aim it shows itself as a conspicuous failure. 
And inasmuch as the Church is so largely submitted 
to human conditions, even as its Incarnate Lord 
was, it is constantly swaying from its ideal, as he 
never did. We show a constant tendency to fall 
back on the methods of worldly strength. We trust 
to organizations, and demand that bishops and 
clergy shall be "good business men with organizing 
ability." We ask for wealth and cultivate the rich 
man, yielding him whatsoever influence he likes to 
claim in the conduct of the parish and the legisla- 
tion of the Church. We multiply all the machinery 
and business methods of a wealthy corporation 
rather than the machinery for the making of saints. 



230 MEDITATIONS ON THE APOSTLES' CREED 

Parishes are spoken of as "active" and "wide- 
awake," when we mean that they are multiplying 
guilds and institutional work. Provided they do 
that, the authorities, lay and clerical, apparently are 
indifferent whether people are led to the Sacra- 
ments — whether the Bread of God is offered his 
children more than once a month. Our "talk is of 
oxen," what wonder that the Church makes money 
rather than saints ! 

There is that in human life that requires opposi- 
tion and hardness to rouse it to effort. Stagnation 
is easy for it. But there is that power and spirit 
within man which, if it can be called forth, will 
overcome all obstacles. What shall arouse us? 
Ought it not to be the opposition of the world, 
rather than the yielding of the world? Ought it 
not to be the appeal of the world's needs, rather 
than the smile of the world's favour ? It is so hard 
to be saints, we sigh, in the environment of a nine- 
teenth century life. But is that not just the stimu- 
lus that we need — the very difficulty? Far up the 
mountain side the water runs from the spring, and 
under the stress of gravity takes its way down the 
slope. As it goes it gathers to itself the water of 
other springs and at last flows out through the 
plain, a mighty river. In its advance it follows the 
line of the least resistance ; it avoids this rock that 
blocks its pathway; it skirts that mountain chain 



BORN OF THE VIRGIN MARY 23 1 

that looks impregnable ; it cuts its way through the 
soft earth in no matter what direction it may lead 
it. But though it seeks thus the easiest way, it has 
abundant strength to overcome the most difficult. 
There, where no other course was open to it, it 
has broken through the mountain chain; here, it 
has dashed over the precipice and eaten its way far 
into the solid rock. If it may, it languidly seeks the 
primrose path; but, if need be, it gathers all its 
strength and dashes the rock in pieces. It is so in 
human life — in your life and mine. We naturally 
seek the easy, the smooth, the pleasant; but there 
is that within us to enable us to overcome all diffi- 
cult situations, too. But in us, it should not be, as 
in the mountain stream, the choice of necessity, but 
of desirability. Our lives should kindle under the 
touch of the heavenly vision; glimpsed from our 
lowliness, the possibility of sanctity should fasci- 
nate us. The feeling of its difficulty should dis- 
solve before the certainty of the divine strength. 
The wonderful power of sanctity lies in the perfec- 
tion of its self-surrender to the strength of God; 
the self-surrender that enabled Mary of Nazareth 
to meet the sword of her earthly life : "Behold the 
handmaid of the Lord, be it unto me according to 
thy word." 

The strength of the Blessed Virgin was just the 
strength of her utter submission to God's will which 



232 MEDITATIONS ON THE APOSTLES' CREED 

she meets without resistance, only with humble 
wonder. One feels that out of her purity and faith 
she could have said nothing else. Any one who 
depended less on God might have failed. In her 
we feel no hesitancy, no sharp crisis of decision. 
She meets without faltering the reproach of her 
child-bearing, the perplexities and trials of her 
future life, the mystery of her Son's conduct, the 
grief of the Cross at the end. There is something 
in this life that compels the admiration of even the 
unsympathetic. What glorious living! What su- 
perb strength! Sanctity has a strange fascination 
Wen for those who do not understand it. The 
world stirs uneasily in the presence of the divine 
ideal of life, perhaps because it feels, however dimly, 
that the ideal was meant for it, too. 

"Hail, thou that art highly favoured,'* the angel 
said. We are sometimes inclined to view special 
revelations from the point of view of demands 
made by God on our lives. We think of the la- 
bours, the sacrifice that is involved in an answer to 
a call of God. We soon begin to think that there 
must be something due us because of the immensity 
of the loss that we have suffered in following the 
call of our Lord — some compensation for our self- 
sacrificing fidelity. "Behold, we have left all and 
followed thee, what shall we have therefore?" 
Would it not be much better to think of the high 



BORN OF THE VIRGIN MARY 233 

privilege that it is to be called of God to any life or 
any work? It fills one with mingled Joy and awe 
to feel that one is where one is to-day, because there 
came a voice of God to one that changed one's 
whole life. Here was a simple virgin living a quiet 
life in an inconspicuous village, and lo! an angel 
came and she is exalted to be the Mother of Incar- 
nate God ! A demand of God — yes, but a trust of 
God, too. A self-committal of God to Mary. For 
years she shall have charge of this Child. He shall 
gain his human experience through her. He shall 
be obedient to her will and responsive to her love. 
Through him she is given all the deepest joys of 
motherhood. The sacrifices she is later called to 
endure flow out of the very fulness and richness of 
their mutual love. Within the very shadow of Cal- 
vary there is a light — the light of the still remem- 
bered human relation : "Woman, behold thy son." 
And is not the essence of any revelation of God's 
will, not that God makes demands upon us, but that 
he puts his cause in our hands — he trusts us? It 
is God's vocation that finds the life which otherwise 
would be meaningless and insignificant, and trusts 
it with work to do. It is merely sinful to dwell on 
the difficulty, the sacrifice, of the work ; to think of 
the earthly relations and earthly gains we are called 
away from. St. Matthew might have led a pros- 
perous and contented life at the receipt of customs, 



234 MEDITATIONS ON THE APOSTLES' CREED 

but there was more life, life richer and fuller, in 
the Apostolate that he was called to, even though 
it was "with persecutions." St. James and St. John 
could, no doubt, have been happy enough in their 
work as fishermen on the Lake of Galilee, but then 
they could never have been taken up in an high 
mountain to see a vision of another world — to see 
the light of heaven spread over the face of the Mas- 
ter as he stood before them in raiment white and 
glistering. The long years of waiting in Ephesus 
and the sword of the executioner, were little to ex- 
change for that. So the limitations of our lives on 
their human side, the sacrifice of this relationship 
or of that pleasure, — what are these that we should 
for a moment weigh them in the balance against a 
mission to perform for God? 

It transfigures all our work to approach it as a 
part of our Christian vocation, as a thing to be 
done with a sense of obligation to him who has 
committed it to us, as the means through which we 
can appeal to him. "In a world which is ever mov- 
ing physically and morally, the one entirely sacri- 
legious thing is to stand still," and to stand still 
spiritually, more than all else. The nature of the 
work that he gives us is not of much consequence ; 
what is of consequence is, that he gives it. Carlyle 
says somewhere: "I call a man remarkable who 
becomes a true workman in the vineyard of the 



BORN OF THE VIRGIN MARY 235 

Highest. Be his work that of palace-building and 
kingdom-founding, or only of delving and ditching, 
to me it is no matter — or next to none. All human 
work is transitory, small in itself, contemptible. 
Only the worker thereof, and the Spirit that dwelt 
in him, is significant." 

Once more; the quality that, humanly speaking, 
fitted St. Mary for her vocation was not great 
capacity of any kind, but her purity and singleness 
of heart. These are the faculties of life that count 
spiritually because they involve the readiness to re- 
spond freely to the presence of God. It is true of 
many lives to which God would come with healing 
presence and satisfying vocation that they are like 
the inn of Bethlehem, crowded. I have read some- 
where of an ancient monastery which had been sec- 
ularised and turned into an inn. All day long and 
far into the night in the room that had been the 
refectory of the monastery where the monks had 
eaten their poor meals in silence as they listened to 
the reading of the Word of God, there was now a 
constant bustle of men coming and going ; the rattle 
of glasses, the careless and often coarse talk of the 
frequenters — at times the singing and the oaths of 
men far gone in drink. On the walls the faded 
frescoes of the life and work of our Lord and his 
saints, which no man had troubled to obliterate, 
stood in silent protest and looked down on the dis- 



236 MEDITATIONS ON THE APOSTLES' CREED 

heartening scene. Our Lord comes and looks into 
many a life with a look that is full of invitation, 
but in its feverish eagerness to snatch the pleasures 
or gain of the day, it never raises its eyes from the 
earth, nor sees his presence. Are there not many 
doors to which an angel comes from standing in the 
presence of God with its "Hail" upon its lips, only 
to find the door closed? Is it not certain that at 
some time the angel stands at the door of every life 
ready to deliver a message from God? 



THE TWELFTH MEDITATION 



THE TWELFTH MEDITATION 

SUFFERED UNDER PONTIUS PILATE, 
WAS CRUCIFIED 

Let us listen to the words of Isaiah — 

^-^ UT he was wounded for our transgressions, 
4/& he was bruised for our iniquities : the chas- 
tisement of our peace was upon him; and 
with his stripes we are healed. 

Let us picture — 

This sufferer, as he appears to the vision of the 
prophet Isaiah. It is in wonderful contrast, this, 
with that other vision of his, the vision of the child 
who was also God, Immanuel. Now the form that 
he sees is that of a prophet like himself; one who 
has unselfishly given himself to the service of his 
people in answer to a divine call. Like every mes- 
238 



SUFFERED UNDER PONTIUS PILATE 239 

senger of God who dares to proclaim divine truth 
to a people sunk in iniquity, he must suffer at the 
hands of those to whom his message is a reproach 
and against whom it is an indictment. But there 
is an unique character in this sufferer of Isaiah's 
vision. He is not merely the messenger sent from 
God and representing him; he is at the same time 
so completely identified with the people that he rep- 
resents them. He is the embodiment of his nation 
toward God, and the messenger of God toward 
Israel. So perfect is his self-identification with his 
nation that they are summed up in him, and he can 
bear the burden and the pain of their sins. They 
are so one that if he suffers for them they also suf- 
fer in him. So we see him, pathetically pleading 
with them, and going forth to his death consciously 
as their representative to bear the doom of their 
sin; but coming forth from the discipline of death 
with the power to offer anew to others the salvation 
that they had hitherto scorned. 

Consider, first — 

That the marks of revelation rest on this picture 
of God's dealing. No human reason could have 
imagined this solitary sufferer as the method of 
Israel's redemption, still less as the redemption of 
the world. The conquering king that ultimately 
did fill Israel's imagination of the future is the more 



240 MEDITATIONS ON THE APOSTLES' CREED 

natural thought. But it is not God's thought. It is 
our thought because we do not sufficiently realise 
the effect of sin upon the relation of man and God. 
Humanity will not take its sins seriously. It con- 
tents itself with thoughts of a law violated, a purely 
exterior notion; it finds difficulty is rising to the 
notion of a relation broken, a much more serious 
matter. To forgive one for the offense against a 
law were an easy matter; to restore a relation of 
love that has been broken off is much more serious. 
To get back to God implies not simply a promise 
of new obedience ; the turning from a past that may 
now be forgotten in the confidence with which we 
look forward to the future; it means the undoing 
of the evil that the past has done to ourselves, by 
the healing of the spiritual wounds from which we 
are suffering, and the restoration of the soul that 
has broken from the divine communion to its origi- 
nal relation to God. This is something that an act 
of amnesty, which is all that the average man con- 
ceives necessary in dealing with sin, could by no 
means accomplish. It could only be accomplished 
by the renewal, the reintegration, of the spiritual 
nature of man which was so far shattered by the 
fact of sin that it was incapable of accomplishing 
any renewal for itself. All man could do was to 
suffer for his sin, accept its penalty; God alone 
could renew. So God must come to man. 



SUFFERED UNDER PONTIUS PILATE 24 1 

Consider, second — 

There must needs be two stages, so to say, in 
this process of the restoration of the human into 
communion with the divine. There is the broad 
act by which redemption is won for all. God will- 
eth all men to be saved. And there is the personal 
act by which this general salvation becomes a part 
of the experience of the individual. Our Lord re- 
deems man; but the individual man must manage 
to appropriate this salvation to himself. Punish- 
ment will not do it, suffering will not do it; hence 
the futility of certain notions of future punishment 
as though man must be released when he has suf- 
fered and been punished enough. The only thing 
that will restore the lost friendship of God is the 
renewal of our spiritual integrity so that there may 
be renewed harmony between us. Consider, that 
in your personal case, if your religion has had any 
effect, it has meant your spiritual renewal — your 
reinstatement as the child of God. How far has 
this gone on in your experience ? Do you find your 
relations with God growing, if one may put it in 
that way, more friendly and more confidential ? Is 
the sense of the constant presence of God growing? 
Do you find it easier to refer all your life to him? 
Are spiritual activities becoming the natural modes 
of your self-expression I think that it is along 
such lines that we are to look for true progress. 



242 MEDITATIONS ON THE APOSTLES CREED 

We are so apt to look for it in the exterior field of 
the accomplishment of routine, rather than in the 
interior field of conformity of will and realised com- 
munion. Does God become more and more plain 
to me as a part of daily experience? Do I find it 
easier to refer my whole life to him as my Saviour 
and friend? 

So let us pray — 

That we may appropriate to ourselves more the 
fruits of our Lord's atonement; that we may grow 
in the friendship of God. 

O Christ, the Son of God, whom God the Father 
gave up for all, when he received thee as a true 
sacrifice for us ; receive the desires of thy people ; 
save those whom thou hast redeemed ; give life to 
those whom thou hast delivered; and grant that, 
through thee, whom we believe to have been cruci- 
fied for all, we may have remission of sins in this 
life, and everlasting joy in the life to come. 
Through the same Jesus Christ, our Lord. 

If we study our Bible faithfully we notice that, 
as the gradual unfolding of the revelation that is 
contained in it goes on, certain elements that are 
involved in the relation of God to man are becom- 
ing more complete and are being outlined with 
greater clearness. The notion of sin, in particular, 



SUFFERED UNDER PONTIUS PILATE 243 

gradually passes beyond the conception of it as a 
tribal or national offence, to a stage in which it has 
become individualised as an offence disruptive of 
the personal relation of the soul to God. Individual 
dependence on God's will and responsibility to God 
is accentuated with a sharpness that admits of no 
blurring of the sense of personal sin. God's atti- 
tude toward sin is depicted with a clearness that 
leaves nothing to the imagination ; it is character- 
ised with all the frank anthropomorphism of the Old 
Testament, in language that it is not possible to 
mistake, as burning anger. There is no question 
any longer of a shifted and divided responsibility; 
the soul must stand out naked and unsheltered to 
receive its sentence : — "The soul that sinneth, it 
shall die." 

And in the second place, that thought of a divine 
intervention for the deliverance of man from the 
power and consequences of sin, which is the sub- 
stance of the hope that underlies the primitive 
stories of man's life on the earth, and charges them 
with a buoyant optimism, so that in some stories — 
as those of Eden and the Deluge — the ending is not 
in the darkness of hopeless catastrophe, but in the 
setting sun breaking through the clouds and chang- 
ing their blackness to masses of royal purple em- 
blazoned with golden bars — becomes as the story 
goes on, cut out, as to its outline, in sharper defini- 



244 MEDITATIONS ON THE APOSTLES' CREED 

tion. The interest of God, if one may so express it, 
grows more intense, his intervention more certain, 
his immanence in human history more keenly felt. 
The intervention of God in human history comes 
to be read, not in terms of the poetic imagination, as 
in the Genesis stories; not in terms of exceptional 
deliverance, as in the Book of Judges; but as a 
steady pressure on the whole national life and for- 
tunes of Israel. A pressure, too, it become clearer 
as we go on, which is exercised from within upon 
the spiritual faculties of man, giving rise in Israel 
to the phenomenon of prophecy. Israel's life is 
being stimulated and forced up by the dynamic ac- 
tion of the prophets' preaching, till it reaches the 
level of spiritual capacity from which it can be led 
on from the thought of a general interest of God 
in its life, to the more precise thought of God's in- 
tervention through a personal deliverer. It is a 
great step in advance when we are enabled to see 
Israel as the vantage ground from which God will 
act, through the man of his choice, upon all the 
nations of the world. From the conception of 
deliverance we have passed to the conception of a 
Deliverer, who shall be the perfect representative 
of God. From the conception of deliverance we 
have advanced to a conception of a deliverance 
through Israel which shall affect all the nations of 
the world. 



SUFFERED UNDER PONTIUS PILATE 245 

And in the third place, we get lights cast here 
and there, upon the character of the Deliverer. He 
is portrayed, certainly, in terms of Israelite nation- 
ality; but he tends to transcend those terms. His 
career is many-sided, but his character is uniform 
in this, at least, that he is the faithful representative 
of God. We should naturally expect that the sense 
of his power would be stressed and his future glory 
exalted, and so it is ; but at the same time there is 
another line of thought concerning him. As through 
the triumphant harmonies of an overture there 
steals at times a motif that is premonitory of pain 
and sorrow, so through all the glorious vision of the 
Messianic Kingdom — the triumph of its King — 
there steals the motif of suffering telling of some 
dim agony to be undergone — some thorn-laced path 
to be trodden, before the Deliverer can enter into 
his glory. The sense of spiritual combat that weeps 
and supplicates throughout the Psalter, becomes 
incarnate in the desolate sufferer of the twenty- 
second Psalm, clinging to his trust in God amid the 
roaring of the lions and the trampling of the oxen, 
confident still of his mission to proclaim God's 
Name unto his brethren. Across the sun-flushed 
vision of Isaiah, streaming with the light of coming 
victory, there drifts the shadow of the suffering 
Prophet who gathers Israel's sins into his bosom 
to take them with him to the place of sacrifice. And 



246 MEDITATIONS ON THE APOSTLES' CREED 

then we stand silent before the final mystery — the 
mystery of deliverance through a sacrifice : — "It 
pleased the Lord to bruise him, he hath put him to 
grief; when his soul shall make an offering for sin, 
he shall see his seed, he shall prolong his days, and 
the pleasure of the Lord shall prosper in his hand." 
It was centuries after that the words spoken on the 
road to a Judean village illumined all the prophets* 
pages : — "O fools, and slow of heart to believe all 
that the prophets have spoken ; ought not the Christ 
to have suffered these things and to enter into his 
glory?" 

Of all the teachings of the Christian Scriptures 
none has proved a harder saying than this that we 
call the doctrine of the atonement. Endless, and of 
extreme bitterness, have been the denunciations of 
it; endless, and of extreme ingenuity, the explana- 
tions offered. We are as helpless before the ulti- 
mate ground of it as before the mystery of pain. 
But may I point out that in either case the ultimate 
ground is not a matter that concerns the conduct of 
human life. To seek the ultimate ground of the 
Atonement is the natural impulse of the speculator's 
mind. Practical religion seeks to know so much 
as shall afford a rational basis for conduct. Why 
our deliverance from sin required the death of the 
Son of God need not in any wise concern us. 
The Biblical revelation represents man as separ- 



SUFFERED UNDER PONTIUS PILATE 247 

ated from God by the fact of his sin. Sin destroys 
the harmony that should naturally be between the 
creature and his maker. Essentially, sin is the de- 
flection of the will of man from the will of God, 
resulting in action contrary to the will of God and 
injury to man's spiritual nature. This fact of sin, 
however, is not exclusive matter of Revelation. 
The religious consciousness of man as exhibited in 
the religions of the world, with all their varying 
forms of propitiatory action, tell the same story. 
And that it is a true story, each of us can bear wit- 
ness, having the evidence within us in the voice of 
conscience. Man could not free himself from the 
sense of sin. It remained for God to take the initia- 
tive and provide the way. 

The way provided was the life and death of 
Jesus Christ. In regard to this certain things seem 
to be absolutely plain. But in the first place we 
must free ourselves from any lingering remains of 
a commercial theory of the Atonement. The Atone- 
ment was not a price paid to anybody as in full 
settlement for the injury done to God by sin. It 
was not a punishment exacted for sin, which if it 
could not be exacted from man himself, was ac- 
cepted from some one else, as the equivalent. It 
was not the satisfaction of the vengeance of an 
angry God, as the secularist books represented. It 
was not the substitution of one victim for another, 



248 MEDITATIONS ON THE APOSTLES'* CREED 

a more valuable for a less valuable. The solution 
of the difficulty is to be sought in quite another 
direction. It is to be sought and found in the love 
of the Father for his children — a love which be- 
comes incarnate, when God himself, in the Person 
of his Son, the Second Person of the Ever-Blessed 
Trinity, assumes the servant form and himself 
comes to man's assistance. There is no separation 
of will between the Father and the Son, they are 
simply expressing the harmonious will of the Trin- 
ity to rescue man. 

Now, I do not know, I do not think it in the least 
matters what I do not and cannot know, whether 
this was the only way to save man, or why in the 
wisdom of God this was the way chosen. To dwell 
on that seems to me the most barren of specula- 
tion; and to raise my ignorance into a bar to the 
acceptance of the fact itself, would seem to me the 
crudest sort of human pride. What I am assured 
of, is, that I, in common with the rest of humanity, 
must be delivered from sin and that the life and 
death of Jesus is the method employed by God for 
that deliverance. I do known that "God so loved 
the world that he gave his only-begotten Son, to 
the end that all that believe on him should not per- 
ish, but have everlasting life." I do know that "God 
sent his Son into the world, not to condemn the 
world, but that the world through him might be 



SUFFERED UNDER PONTIUS PILATE 249 

saved." And that is all the doctrine of the Atone- 
ment that I find any need for. 

The method that God chose, then, is the method 
of identification with man. He took human nature 
— he lived a human life, and died a human death. 
He was made in all points like as we are, yet with- 
out sin. He exhibited, that is, the divine ideal of 
human life. He lived a life that from beginning to 
end was a life of obedience. Therein was the mean- 
ing of his sacrifice and of his acceptance with God. 
He was obedient to all the conditions of human 
life, he was obedient to all the thought of God for 
human life, he was obedient unto death, even the 
death of the Cross. This obedience was not a 
merely formal obedience, but an obedience that he 
learned under human conditions : — "He learned 
obedience through the things that he suffered," — 
and because of this obedience "God also hath 
highly exalted him" as to his humanity, "and hath 
given him a name which is above every name ; that 
at the name of Jesus, every knee should bow, of 
things in heaven and things in earth and things 
under the earth ; and that every tongue should con- 
fess that Jesus Christ is Lord to the glory of God 
the Father." 

Here then are three things : the pitiful and help- 
less sin of man who had by the experience of un- 
numbered centuries learned that he could by no 



250 MEDITATIONS ON THE APOSTLES* CREED 

efforts of his own free himself from the servitude 
of sin and gain peace in his conscience and with 
God; the ineffable love of the Blessed Trinity ex- 
pressing itself in the Incarnation of God the Son; 
and the method of that love revealed in the self- 
sacrifice of a human life and death. He willed to 
meet us under complete human conditions, and 
those conditions meant sacrifice and suffering. 

The instinct of humanity has always recognized 
that its highest capacity is its capacity to love ; and 
that the completest expression of this love is found 
in self-sacrifice for the good of others. It has re- 
mained for modern times, I think, to deny that; 
but it is safe to say that the denial will never find 
many sympathisers. The conviction is too deeply 
rooted — it runs upward from the earliest folk-tales 
to the highest philosophical and religious embodi- 
ments. It is of the very essence of the hero in all 
times and places, that he is heroic for others and 
not for himself. When the question is raised, 
whether a world is well made in which one man is 
called to sacrifice himself for others, the answer is, 
that while we know nothing of the possible advant- 
ages of worlds made otherwise, we know that in a 
world made as ours is, in the possibility of sacrifice 
lies the completest expression of love. It is through 
sacrificing love that we find the possibility of identi- 
fying our lives with the lives of others. As our 



SUFFERED UNDER PONTIUS PILATE 25 1 

common saying expresses it, — we share their for- 
tunes. That is what our Lord did for us — he 
shared our fortunes. He so identified himself with 
us, that he not only shared our fortunes, but he 
made it possible for us to share his. 

In that, we reach the understanding of the efficacy 
of the Atonement for the individual Christian. If 
we may so express it, the Atonement that the Son 
of God accomplished by his life and death, of which 
the summing up and highest symbol is the Cross, 
was still outside man and only ideally effective. 
The world was potentially redeemed ; there was 
need of further action before any single soul re- 
ceived the results of the Redemption made. We 
learn of the action of Jesus Christ and then we say : 
How can that profit me ? How can I become a par- 
taker of the benefits of His death? Is it by faith? 
Shall I find the Cross of Christ available for me if 
I believe with an intense faith in him? Is my hope 
that he will shelter me under the "robe of his right- 
eousness"? Or will his example stimulate me to 
good works and an ethical life so that I shall be 
found acceptable to God? 

Let us take up once more the thought that we 
have been trying to keep before our minds all 
through these studies of the Creed, the thought that 
we have found fundamental wherever we have 
touched the relation of God to man, the thought 



252 MEDITATIONS ON THE APOSTLES' CREED 

that that relation could not consist in a relation of 
will or of external influence, but that it became an 
intelligible relation only in the light of the Incarna- 
tion which revealed God's purpose to unite himself 
with man and to raise man to be "in God." The 
process of redemption and renewal is not complete 
for the individual till he is "in God," — till, in his 
case, the Incarnation has become effective and he 
is in union with God. The process of the renewal 
of the human soul is therefore not an artificial, dra- 
matic, judicial process, as the result of which a 
person unchanged is treated as though some change 
had been wrought in him because of the work of 
Christ; but a real process by which the soul that 
comes to our Lord seeking to be made partaker of 
his Atonement is actually taken into the Body of 
the Incarnation, and cleansed from sin — is put in 
vital contact with the source of life. His being in 
Christ is the ground of the process of his sanctifi- 
cation. 

This becomes a little plainer, perhaps, if we fol- 
low the course of what actually does happen in the 
Christian life under normal conditions. The first 
stage of that life is that effected in the Sacrament 
of Baptism ; the child is brought to God in the sac- 
rament, and what happens? The child is regen- 
erate and taken into the Body of Christ and made a 
partaker of the divine nature. The place of faith 



SUFFERED UNDER PONTIUS PILATE 253 

in the transaction is that the action itself is insti- 
gated by faith in the promise of God. But the full 
account of the matter is not that the child is ac- 
cepted because we believe, or because anybody 
believes, but because a supernatural transaction has 
taken place by virtue of which this child has be- 
come a new creature — is now in Christ and par- 
taker of eternal life — Christ's life. This relation of 
union normally deepens with the child's growth, in 
later years, in Christian experience, and shows its 
actuality by the production of the fruits of the 
Spirit. But should the child, having grown to 
years of discretion, sin, then the relation of union 
between it and its Saviour is injured, and perhaps 
broken. But the injured relation is capable of re- 
integration. The love of God has provided for a 
future application of the Atonement to the sinful 
soul. In the Sacraemnt of Penance the repentance 
of the sinner is answered by its restoration to the 
state of union by a fresh impartation of the Incar- 
nate Life to the soul. Here again the transaction 
is one of renewal and impartation. The soul is 
cleansed, not by judicial sentence, but by vital con- 
tact. And throughout the life of the Christian its 
spiritual life is sustained and deepened and invig- 
ourated by the same vital contact in its participa- 
tion in the life of Christ, by the reception of the 
living Jesus in the Sacrament of the Altar. That 



254 MEDITATIONS ON THE APOSTLES'' CREED 

sacrament again, is not a pledge to faith, or an act 
of religious obedience, or the expression of our 
Church membership, but a real reception of Incar- 
nate God, whereby we dwell in him and he in us. 
From this point of view the sacraments lose their 
external and artificial character (a view of them, as 
we may say in passing, which explains how men 
can think of them as "observances" which may be 
dispensed with or infrequently conformed to, at 
Easter, for example), and are seen to be the very 
ground and sustenance of the normal Christian life, 
perpetually needed as being the permanent chan- 
nels for the renewal of the spiritual vitality which 
is being constantly exhausted by the struggle of life. 
Let us push our thought one stage further. By 
virtue of our union with our Lord, become possible 
through the position that he, by his self-sacrificing 
life and perfect obedience, has acquired as the new 
Head of humanity, we have become, by becoming 
Christians, members not only of him, but of all 
others who are in him; that is, of one another. 
Such is the solidarity of the Body of Christ, that 
the members become dependent on one another; if 
one member rejoice, all rejoice with it; if one suf- 
fer, all suffer in its suffering. And just as the 
Incarnation of the Son of God is a permanent and, 
in a sense, constantly extending fact, as the life of 
Christ is constantly being extended in the new 



SUFFERED UNDER PONTIUS PILATE 255 

members that are regenerated in him and incor- 
porated in his Body, so that his Bo"dy undergoes a 
very real growth in the growth of the Church; so 
we may say of the Atonement that it undergoes a 
certain extension in the experience of the mystical 
Body. 

There is in the Body, a community of pain; the 
members not only suffer with one another, but for 
one another, and in this also Christ suffers. They 
make up what is lacking in the sufferings of Christ, 
and in all their afflictions he is afflicted. We think 
of the case of the martyr, for example ; the whole 
Church suffers with him. The story of a Hanning- 
ton or a Patterson sends a thrill of pain through 
the whole Church, as the injured nerve sends a 
thrill of pain through the whole of our body. And 
the martyr suffers on our behalf, as our representa- 
tive, as the embodiment of the mission of the 
Church. And in what we think of as secular 
things ; in the sins, the pains, the failures that mark 
the progress of the life of the Church, no one mem- 
ber is unconcerned. It is the Body of Christ that 
suffers when the child drifts into a life of sin, when 
the young girl "goes wrong," as we say in our 
veiled phrases, when the strength of a man gives 
way before a temptation that Christian sympathy 
might have sustained him under. We bear our part, 
and rightly, of the shame and reproach, though per- 



MEDITATIONS ON THE APOSTLES' CREED 

sonally we could not help. In the deliberate offer- 
ing of himself to the Church in arduous work, in 
self-sacrificing labour, in sustaining its work at the 
expense of vigorous self-limitation, in giving himself 
to the priesthood, the religious life, the mission field, 
a man is taking the Cross of Christ and abandoning 
self-pleasing. Christ pleased not himself. His 
great apostle, whom he reproached with persecuting 
him, was not disobedient to the heavenly vision, 
and we know into what life of suffering the follow- 
ing of it led him. And any one who limits himself 
by the taking of the cross on behalf of his brethren, 
enters into the atoning life of his Lord. 

Again, there is a side of this sorrow-bearing and 
sin-bearing that we express by the word sympathy. 
Other people are disturbed by social injustice and 
calamity; they are disturbed about the houses of 
the people, and their drains, and their food. We 
are disturbed by these things too. But we are filled 
with a grief that has deeper roots than that. What 
greatly troubles us about the wretched condition of 
tens of thousands of poor folk, is not only that 
their condition destroys the possibility of bodily 
health and comfort and the joy of life, but that the 
conditions render spiritual living and a sense of 
God's love and care so very difficult. We grieve 
for the lives that are stunted and blighted by the 
evil environment in which they are compelled to 



SUFFERED UNDER PONTIUS PILATE 257 

live. We grieve at the hardness of a world that 
will have money at the cost of ruined lives and 
hardened souls. We suffer in that our own lives 
are so involved with the society in which we live 
that we cannot say that we have no responsibility 
for its failure and sin. The sympathy that impels 
us to do what we may to alleviate poverty and suf- 
fering, the limitation of our powers which prevents 
our own best efforts for accomplishing much, and 
leaves us so often powerless to execute our plans 
and hopes, the helplessness in which we are to res- 
cue others from sin and degradation, — all these are 
forms of suffering which come to us because we are 
in Christ and entrusted with his work. It is part 
of our vocation that we carry in our bodies the 
Dying of the Lord Jesus, 



THE THIRTEENTH MEDITATION 



THE THIRTEENTH MEDITATION 

DEAD, AND BURIED 
Let us listen to the words of the Gospel — 

HND he begged the body of Jesus, and took 
it down, and wrapped it in linen, and laid 

it in a sepulchre. 

Let us picture to ourselves — 

This final scene in the earthly life of Jesus. Upon 
all who had been near and dear to him, hopeless- 
ness and despair have fallen. Those who might 
have been expected to be near him at the last are 
scattered by fear. The few faithful ones about the 
cross are too overcome by grief, by the shattering 
of their hopes, to be able to do anything practical. 
The work of his burial falls to Joseph of Arama- 
thea, one who had not been at all prominent in the 
261 



262 MEDITATIONS ON THE APOSTLES' CREED 

following of our Lord. Let us picture the sadness 
with which the few faithful ones receive his body 
from the Roman authorities and bear it away to 
lay it in the tomb of Joseph. One pictures the 
Blessed Mother, the sword now through her own 
heart, following the body. To her this death was 
not, as to so many others, the wreck of Messianic 
hopes; it was beside that the death of her child — 
the child of so many promises and so many aspira- 
tions. But there were other watchers with quite 
other thoughts. Imagine the interests of the Jew- 
ish authorities in the disposal of the body of Jesus. 
They remembered the promises of a resurrection, 
even if the disciples in their grief had for the mo- 
ment forgotten them. They determine to see that 
the body is well guarded, lest what "this deceiver 
saith" should come to pass through the fraud of 
the disciples. It must have been an added grief to 
all the friends of our Lord that these prying in- 
truders were ever in sight. 

Consider, first — 

The overwhelming disaster that the crucifixion 
and death of our Lord was to all who had placed 
their confidence in his mission. Day by day 
through the years of his ministry the conviction had 
been growing in the minds of those who were near- 
est to him, that this was indeed he that would de- 



DEAD AND BURIED 263 

liver Israel. His teaching about his coming king- 
dom, his displays of more than human power, his 
mysterious character, evidently in some intimate 
relation to God, had produced an ever-rising tide 
of hope. And if in the last days, his action had 
chilled the enthusiasm of the multitude to a certain 
extent, that enthusiasm was still at its height in 
those who were nearest to him, and flamed up once 
more among the multitude on that morning when 
he entered Jerusalem in triumphal procession amid 
the hosannas of the acclaiming crowd. Then there 
was the mysterious failure of our Lord to make 
use of the enthusiasm ; and disaster follows fast on 
disaster — the arrest, the trial, the condemnation, the 
crucifixion, the death. Obviously, their conception 
of him and his mission was mistaken, and they 
could hardly fail to look upon the sealed tomb as 
the end. Yet they must have been haunted by 
vague hopes of they hardly knew what. Their 
confidence in him was so strong that they could not 
but feel that there was a mistake somewhere. We 
picture them in the hours following going over 
among themselves all his words, trying to find where 
they had mistaken them; trying to get some new 
light of hope and consolation from them. They 
thought that this was he that should have restored 
the kingdom unto Israel, and they cannot quite give 
up the hope even in the face of its obvious failure. 



264 MEDITATIONS ON THE APOSTLES' CREED 

Consider, second — 

How often in hours of darkness we are apt to be 
in much the same case. The thing that we have 
undertaken in trust in God's guidance and protec- 
tion seems to fail. And we turn back on ourselves 
and try to see where our mistake has been. Have 
we misinterpreted the leading of God? Have we 
blundered in attempting to carry out his will ? We 
go over and over again with aching hearts and 
throbbing brains the round of facts and actions, 
always arriving at the same issue, the same failure, 
the same despair. It was so well planned and so 
well executed up to the very last, and then the un- 
foreseen factor emerged and ruined all. We really 
could not have foreseen that. But our mistake was 
not in what we did, but in what we expected. Our 
attempt has not really failed, but we fail to see 
God's mind in the work. It is going on all well 
enough if only we will trust God a little longer. 
The closed tomb is not final disaster, but the path 
that leads to success and the vindication of the plan 
of God. "O fools and slow of heart !" No faithful 
work can fail of its success. Wait for the third 
morning, and God shall emerge from the tomb tri- 
umphant and all your trust in him shall be vindi- 
cated. The victory of God will be only the more 
complete and the more evident when he arises tri- 
umphant over death; your work will be the more 



DEAD AND BURIED 265 

completely justified when it has at last passed 
through its seemingly final defeat to its joyous tri- 
umph. It is a quality of sanctity that it will not 
accept defeat if it knows that it is doing God's will 
in trust and submission. Great works have most 
often to pass through their period of apparent de- 
feat before they arrive at their complete vindica- 
tion. 

Let us pray, then — 

For the faith that will not be dismayed by defeat. 
Let us pray for complete trust in God. 

Almighty God, who through thy only begotten 
Son, Jesus Christ, hast overcome death and opened 
to us the gate of everlasting life ; we humbly be- 
seech thee that, as by thy special grace preventing 
us thou dost put into our minds good desires, so by 
thy continual help we may bring the same to good 
effect, through Jesus Christ, our Lord, who liveth 
and reigneth with thee and the Holy Ghost, ever, 
one God, world without end. 

The followers of Jesus were unlearned and ig- 
norant men from the point of view of the culture 
of the times ; but when they came to set down their 
impressions of the death of their Master, they did 
it with such touching simplicity that their work 
abides as a supreme expression of the creative 



266 MEDITATIONS ON THE APOSTLES' CREED 

power of love. Love has done what literary train- 
ing could not have done — given us a not unworthy 
description of the dying of the Saviour of the 
world. Whatever working over of traditions may 
conceivably lie back of the Gospels as we to-day 
have them, it is inconceivable that the accounts of 
the dying of Jesus could have any other source 
than the eyes that saw him through their tears, 
hanging in the last agony above the heads of the 
hostile or indifferent crowd. The narrators used 
the realistic expressions of the experience of simple 
souls of a scene that tears their hearts and fills 
them with despair. We are not at all in the region 
of facts long meditated and thought out in relation 
to subsequent facts ; that is the astonishing thing, 
that, written as they were, long after the experience 
of the Resurrection and the rise of a new concep- 
tion of the meaning of our Lord's life and death, 
they show no trace of later experiences, but faith- 
fully depict the feelings of the passing hour. There 
is no undertone of triumph in them, no hint that 
this death is to be swallowed up in victory. They 
render the contemporary impression of the Cruci- 
fixion with no touch of conscious artistry, but with 
the unconscious pathos that deep grief gives to the 
words of simple minds. There is nothing more 
wonderful in all Scriptures than this detachment 
from all subsequent belief and experience, and the 



DEAD AND BURIED 267 

return to the mood which was theirs when the dark- 
ness closed over Calvary on that first Good Friday 
afternoon. We feel that the impressions of those 
hours were indelible and came back to them in the 
hours of vigorous and successful work, as moments 
of inextinguishable emotion that no subsequent ex- 
perience could blur; standing out in their lives as 
some moment of inexpressible agony stands at 
times in our experience, with a pain that so absorbs 
us that for an instant we forget that it has passed. 
As a result, we too feel, as we meditate on the 
Gospel stories, that we stand beneath the Cross. 
The scene comes to us with all the freshness of a 
memory. The triumphant activity of the Jewish 
authorities trying to cover with an appearance of 
gravity and decorum a too obvious expression of 
the sense of success ; the professionalism of the 
bearing of the Roman soldiers, their indifference, 
their feeling that it is all in the day's work, varied 
only by the not very exciting game that determines 
the possession of the few poor garments ; the grief 
of those of the followers of our Lord whose cour- 
age had been great enough to bring them to see 
the end, or that little group where there was no 
question of courage or fear of death, but of pas- 
sionate devotion to Son and Master; and some- 
where in the 'background a disgraced and tortured 



268 MEDITATIONS ON THE APOSTLES' CREED 

Peter, weeping bitterly. Standing here we feel at 
the heart of things. 

What is death, as we see it revealed here? If 
we have learned and do learn of life from the life 
of Jesus, may we not also learn of death from his 
death 

The death of Jesus is the last act of his self- 
submission to human experience; human experi- 
ence is not complete without death. He chose the 
human lot frankly, with all that it involved. He 
chose to be like us in all things, without sin, yet 
accepting the results of sin in its exterior effects. 
We think of this as being the heart of his suffer- 
ings — that he must have borne so much of contact 
with sin as that. For any approach or shadow of 
sin to the sinless is exquisite pain. We understand 
a little of this in a dim way. We are quite used to 
sin ; the thought of it does not poison our lives or 
beget in us the sense of a loathsome presence. Still, 
when we analyse our experience we find that our 
experience of sin is limited to the experience of cer- 
tain sins ; these we are used to as household things. 
I do not mean that we never regret them or fight 
against them or repent of them ; no doubt we do — 
but still that does not remove the sense of famil- 
iarity. But out beyond them there is a region of 
sin into which we never penetrate even in imagina- 
tion, and there, strangely, is located the sense of 



DEAD AND BURIED 269 

our hatred of sin. There are the bad sins — the sins 
we have not committed — the sins of strange shapes 
at which we shudder. We have sometimes a horror 
of people who commit them. This is a very real 
sense of the awfulness of certain sins, and if we 
could ever make it co-extensive with the notion of 
sin we should find ourselves in the attitude of a 
pure person who had never sinned. But in our 
Lord the alienation of his nature from sin was 
complete. He could not sin ; and just because he 
could not, because it was so alien from his nature, 
he could feel its approach and presence as defil- 
ment, its results that he accepted, as pain almost 
intolerable. The pain of death from which he 
shrank, was not the pain of physical dissolution, 
but the touch of the last enemy, the wages of sin 
that he was content to accept without having earned 
them. 

We fight against this, the instinctive horror of 
death, just because being sinful we fear the conse- 
quences of death. The fear of death itself we try 
to hide under flowers and idealise into poetry. But 
the consequences of death our Lord did not shrink 
from, for beyond death is the love of the Father 
into whose hands he committed himself. There, 
too, is our sure foundation : — "There is now no 
condemnation to them that are in Christ Jesus." 
Death viewed, not as the necessary experience of 



270 MEDITATIONS ON THE APOSTLES' CREED 

the sinful, but as the passing of the redeemed and 
pardoned soul to the condition of fuller and more 
perfect life, has no terror. Why should we fear the 
power of death? We have behind us the lives of 
Christians; that is, lives that have striven humbly 
and obediently to fulfil the will of God. They have 
not been perfect lives ; but they have been lives ex- 
pressive of a continuous purpose. They have 
worked, with whatever of transient failure and dis- 
aster, toward an ideal clearly seen and consciously 
embraced. Their failure has not been due to ob- 
stinate rebellion, but to temporary loss of power 
and obscurance of the ideal, from which we have 
recovered by the use of God's grace. Our sins have 
revealed to us our - weakness and led us to the 
refuge of the penitent, the love of the Saviour. 
The perception of our weakness has aroused in us 
the sense of our dependence and led us to seek a 
deeper union with our Lord. We have found in his 
pardoning love the marvel of the sympathy of God 
revealed to us. But if our lives have been stained 
at times, they have not been unfruitful ; they have 
been responsive to the guidance of the Holy Spirit 
and have brought forth fruit. With such a history 
behind him, why should the Christian fear the is- 
sues of death? Is it not certain that the experience 
of our Lord's love and care that we have had hith- 
erto will only be deepened and intensified in the 



DEAD AND BURIED 27 1 

future ? Is it to be supposed that the hand of the 
Father that has led us all our life long will be un- 
clasped now ? Is it not certain that the love which 
has meant so much under those imperfect condi- 
tions will not fail us then? Why fear? 

As we stand by the Cross, watching the dying of 
Jesus, there is impressed upon us the permanency 
of character. Those qualities of love and sympathy 
and unselfish thought for others which had been so 
conspicuous in his life stand out here emphatically 
in his dying. There is that deep understanding of 
human nature which made it possible for him to 
distinguish between the surface manifestations of 
life and inner character; which made it impossible 
for him ever to indulge in the crude judgments of 
men which display the limitations of our knowledge 
and the superficialities of our understanding. He 
plunges deep down into the personalities of men 
and reads them in their reality. You remember how 
surprising his reading of human nature often is. 
He never mistakes surface enthusiasm for that 
deep devotion which alone is capable of the highest 
sacrifice. Thus he read the superficial good inten- 
tions of the rich young ruler and applied a test 
that revealed him to himself and sent him away 
sorrowing. Thus he displays the nature of his ser- 
vice in its hardest, most repellant aspects before 
the enthusiasm of a would-be disciple : "Foxes have 



272 MEDITATIONS ON THE APOSTLES' CREED 

holes and the birds of the air have nests, but the 
Son of Man hath not where to lay his head." Thus 
he pitilessly exposes the superficial character of St. 
Peter's professions of devotion : "Verily, I say 
unto you, before the cock crow, thou shalt deny me 
thrice." But the mistake of a man about himself is 
not always the mistake of an over-estimate of his 
devotion and power of sacrifice. There are times 
when our Lord sees under a surface sinfulness, a 
character of which the sin is not the complete ex- 
pression. So he can pardon those who have not 
asked for pardon, saying: "Go, and sin no more." 
So he can read under the crass self-pushing and 
ambition of the sons of Zebedee, an inner strength 
of consecration to his person that will enable them 
to drink of his cup and to be baptised with his bap- 
tism. And so, in the crisis of the Crucifixion he 
can see in the cruelty and indifference of those who 
nail him to his cross, only the manifestation of a 
surface ignorance, and the inner possibility of a 
response to the grace of God : — "Father, forgive 
them, for they know not what they do." The same 
quality of judgment is visible in his intercourse 
with the robber who hangs by his side. He de- 
taches himself, as it were, from his own pain, to 
estimate this life, and perceives within it an inner 
love of goodness that is now coming into evidence 
in a vague sense of his own wickedness and need of 



DEAD AND BURIED 273 

help. He knows that the man is still capable of 
response to God, and he supplies the answer to the 
capacity : — "To-day shalt thou be with me in Para- 
dise." The first faint gleams of the dawn of peni- 
tence in the soul are perceptible to the love of 
Jesus. 

Then, too, we see in our Lord's dying the depth 
and persistency of his sympathy. The breadth of 
his sympathy, to be sure, is the quality in his char- 
acter that makes us surest of his divinity. It is an 
entirely wrong instinct that seizes upon our Lord's 
miracles as the indications of his divinity; and it 
is well to have our attention called to the fact that 
the early preaching of the Gospel made no such 
appeal. Read St. Paul's Epistles, if you will, and 
note that the appeal is not at all to the wonder- 
working power of our Lord. That would have 
been to put the appeal of Christianity in an inacces- 
sible past, to make it dependent upon our reading 
of history, to have put it at the mercy of criticism. 
St. Paul's steady appeal is to a living, present Jesus, 
who is actively and sympathetically dealing with 
human life. "He ever liveth to make intercession 
for us," says the writer of the Epistle to the He- 
brews, striking the same note. And this sympathy 
of our Lord, if we will consider the nature of it, is 
a revelation of the divine mind. 

One of the limitations of human sympathy is 



274 MEDITATIONS ON THE APOSTLES' CREED 

that it tends to be merged in mere tolerance. Men 
to-day talk about breadth of sympathy when their 
attitude is one of indifference to moral values. The 
saying that there is good in all men and all sys- 
tems is either a platitude, or an excuse for not 
making any moral judgments at all. They twist 
the direction, "Judge not," into an axiom of moral 
indifference, a justification for treating moral and 
spiritual issues as though they did not matter. 
That is not the way in which our Lord interpreted 
by his actions his own saying about judgment. The 
very key to his sympathy is that it displays him as 
convinced that moral and spiritual issues matter 
tremendously in a man's life. His sympathy never 
takes the form of indifference to human character. 
His very warnings to his disciples against Phari- 
sees and others imply the expectation of moral 
alertness in them, the cultivation of the capacity of 
spiritual discernment. It is his very sympathy with 
humanity which finds expression in his moral judg- 
ments of condemnation. "Woe unto you, scribes 
and Pharisees!" "Go, tell that fox!" It is the 
very business of sympathy not only to find out the 
good that it may foster it, but to find out the evil 
that it may repress it. The fact that "God makes 
the sun to rise on the evil and on the good, and 
sendeth his rain upon the just and the unjust," is 
not a revelation of moral indifference on his part, 



DEAD AND BURIED 275 

but a revelation of the long-suffering of God that 
leadeth men to repentance. 

We must remember that what is limited in all 
cases is not the sympathy of God, but man's ca- 
pacity to receive it. Our Lord, on his cross, shows 
his love and sympathy towards his Blessed Mother 
and St. John ; there is no bar there ; and he forgets 
his own pain at the sight of theirs. He shows his 
sympathy with the sinner when he opens Paradise 
to the penitent thief because he sees the reality of 
the man's repentance. But what shall we say 
about the unpenitent thief? Was there no love of 
God for him? Surely the same love that finds 
access to the soul of one robber, knocked at the 
door of the soul of the other — but knocked in vain. 
It is we who limit the sympathy of God. There is 
nothing withheld from us but that which we with- 
hold from ourselves. We do not think of the mean- 
ing of Beethoven's sonatas, of Michael Angelo's 
frescoes, of the sculptures of Rodin, being with- 
held from a man, although the man does not see it. 

So men move through a world that is resonant 
with the divine pleading, where God's offers touch 
them on every side. God wills that all men shall 
be saved, but the thief on the cross by his side 
hardens himself and joins in the jeers of the crowd. 
"All things are yours," St. Paul cries, as he pro- 
claims the boundless possibilities of a life hid in 



276 MEDITATIONS ON THE APOSTLES'' CREED 

Christ, but how many of his hearers thought this 
offer merely pulpit rhetoric? The limitations of 
God's revelation and of his mercy, the limitations 
of Christian experience — these are not things im- 
posed arbitrarily from without ; they are my limita- 
tions and your limitations. We take in the mean- 
ing of this Man who dies on his cross so far as we 
will let ourselves. He is for us "one stone more," 
or "the Son of God" — the Saviour of our souls. 

A third thing I wish to draw out from the con- 
templation of the dying of our Lord, is the perfect- 
ness of his trust in the Father. It never crossed 
his thought that the things that he suffered con- 
tained any hint of the divine displeasure towards 
liim, nor anything more than the result of having 
identified himself with man under the conditions of 
sin. There was in Gethsemane a certain shrinking 
from death, but not from the will of the Father. It 
is nowhere implied that the faithful servant ought 
in justice to have life made easy for him. But there 
is that undertone in most of human service, that 
our fidelity ought to be rewarded now by freedom 
from the painful discipline of life. That is ill— 
-considered. To identify ourselves with the atoning 
work of our Lord has as its consequence the bear- 
ing of the results of sin. It is a condition of the 
highest discipleship that we offer ourselves in sac- 
rifice; and that God accepts the offer is not the 



DEAD AND BURIED 277 

mark of his disfavour, but of love. In taking up a 
life of faith and service, we are taking up the cross. 
It seems to me that there is no more common 
misapprehension of the meaning of words than is 
apparent in our common sayings about bearing the 
cross. The meaning of the Cross of Jesus is that 
he willingly took it. If we could conceive a mo- 
ment in which he was unwilling to be crucified, we 
should understand that his crucifixion had no re- 
deeming power. And that is the meaning of any- 
cross — that it is assumed, not imposed. Our talk 
about bearing our cross, when we are only endur- 
ing something that we cannot help and that we 
would instantly be free of if we could, misses the 
whole point. It is no doubt a Christian virtue, to 
endure patiently the sufferings that we cannot help. 
The Apostle praises those who took patiently the 
spoiling of their goods. But that has nothing to do 
with cross-bearing. To bear a cross — to impose 
some limitation on one's self for the sake of Jesus — > 
to give up that that one would fain have, and might 
innocently have; to undertake much that requires 
sacrifice ; to follow a vocation when the pull of our 
inclinations and the pressure of our friends would 
lead us another way. The world is beautiful and 
fascinating and "the love of living" is deep in most 
of us; but there come to us offers from God of 
opportunity to serve, the acceptance of which means 



278 MEDITATIONS ON THE APOSTLES' CREED 

self-repression — means the plucking out of the eye 
and the cutting off of the hand, even when they are 
not causes of offence. It is of the very essence of 
the Christian vocation that we gladly do this in 
some form. One does not conceive a Christian 
without a cross following a Master who bears one. 

But all sacrifice to have any worth or acceptance, 
must be like Christ's, voluntary and glad. A mod- 
ern French writer has well expressed this : "If a 
sacrifice is a sadness for you and not a joy, do not 
make it, you are not worthy to make it ... if 
you do not feel the happiness that there is in giving 
yourself, let it alone, — you are not worthy to live." 

In fact, you do not live in any real sense. You 
have detached yourself from the source of true life, 
and identified yourself with the perishable things. 
There is just that choice — the identification of your- 
self with the perishable or your identification of 
yourself with the Crucified Jesus ; and the symbol 
of your choice is the presence or absence of the 
cross. That is the real character of the man, the 
stamp of his service. The rest of his life will be 
determined by his attitude to the call of Jesus. "If 
any man will come after me, let him take up his 
cross daily and follow me." Daily — it is the mark 
of the direction of the whole life. You read the 
reality of the response in the terms of service. Any- 
thing is to be understood not by a priori reasoning 



DEAD AND BURIED 279 

about it, but by observation of its action — what does 
it do ? This is supremely true of man. Wagner is 
to be understood by his operas — Browning, by his 
poems — Michael Angelo, by his frescoes — Glad- 
stone, by the history of his administrations. So the 
Christian is to be understood by the cross he bears 
— the fruits of his service. From the snows and 
glaciers far up in the cloud-crowned mountains, 
ever flow out the streams that are fed by their 
melting. They run down the mountain side and 
flow out to fertilise the plains. Cities and villages 
live and prosper by them ; the gardens clothe them- 
selves with gorgeous blooms, and the fruits ripen, 
because of the existence of these distant snows. So 
from the inner life of the Christian, which is raised 
above the earth to be a life hid with Christ in God, 
flows out the energy that gives consecrated activity 
to our lives and peace to our souls. 



THE FOURTEENTH MEDITATION 



THE FOURTEENTH MEDITATION 

HE DESCENDED INTO HELL 

Let us listen to the zvords of St. Peter — 

E went and preached unto the spirits in 



1D 



prison. 



Let us picture to ourselves — 

The death of Moses. Among the lives of all the 
servants of God there has been no life more won- 
derful, no man endowed with a more vital and im- 
portant mission. We should have expected that 
such a life would have ended in the glory of some 
great struggle with the enemies of the God of Right- 
eousness whom he revealed to his people ; or, per- 
haps, quietly, in the enjoyment of an accomplished 
work, surrounded by the love and gratitude of a 
283 



284 MEDITATIONS ON THE APOSTLES* CREED 

nation which he had led out of slavery. But in- 
stead, he leaves a work unfinished and goes up to 
the silence of a mountain top, there to die in lone- 
liness. And he dies there, after all the splendour 
of his work, as a man under the displeasure of God. 
There had been a moment of crisis when he had 
thought of himself and not of God ; and the penalty 
is to die here before his work is finished. Here, 
from the top of Pisgar, he looks out over the Land 
of Promise, the land that his people shall dwell in 
but he may not enter. Its streams, its mountains, 
its valleys, its fertile fields, are there before his 
eyes, but he may not enter. Think of his dying 
without attaining. Think how true a symbol it is 
of human life. Which of us ever actually attains? 
"Poor Moses ! Thou too sawest undulating in the 
distance the ravishing hills of the Promised Land, 
and it was thy fate nevertheless to lay thy weary 
bones in a grave dug in a desert ! Which of us has 
not his promised land, his day of ecstasy and his 
death in exile?'' 

Consider, first — 

That the life of the Old Testament saints was an 
expectant life. They lived in the faith of promises 
the fulfilment of which they did not see. We look 
back at the manifest work of God in the accom- 
plishment of his promises. We have God Incarnate 



HE DESCENDED INTO HELL 285 

working with and for us. God has come, and we 
are caught up in the full tide of the Incarnate Life 
with which we are in close communion. They could 
only look forward to One whose Advent was prom- 
ised. Think of the sublime faith of these men 
whose lives were cast amid the most discouraging 
circumstances. It never at any moment in Israel's 
history seemed as though God's work had acquired 
any stability: the power of its enemies, the dis- 
obedience and faithlessness of the nation, seemed 
always on the point of bringing the work to naught. 
But those Old Testament saints and heroes worked 
on and hoped on in the strength of an unconquer- 
able faith in God. God and the word of God were 
certain, and no apparent failure could shake even 
for a moment their faith in him. God had prom- 
ised to come and therefore he would come; God 
had promised to set up his kingdom upon the earth 
and therefore no disaster to Israel could be more 
than temporary. And remember how little revela- 
tion they had in a future life. They did their work 
with no conviction that they should share in the 
triumph of God when it came. They worked just 
because they were God's servants, in utter trust 
and obedience. "And these all having obtained a 
good report through faith, received not the prom- 
ise : God having provided some better thing for us, 
that they without us should not be made perfect." 



286 MEDITATIONS ON THE APOSTLES' CREED 

Consider, second — 

How much there still remains expectant in our 
lives. We have received much, much more than 
even prophets saw in their moments of intensest 
vision; but what we have received is not the com- 
plete establishment of God's purpose for us, but 
the earnest of our inheritance, the vantage ground 
from which we may and must go on to fuller ac- 
complishment. We still live by the faith that the 
prophets had, only now faith in One who has come 
and wills that where he is there shall his servants 
be. For us there is still the forward look, the voca- 
tion to advance the work of the kingdom, which is 
in the world, indeed, but still has before it its great- 
est conquests. However, our association with the 
work of God has not the temporary aspect that had 
that of the saints of old. We are assured not only 
of the permanence of the work but of the perma- 
nence of our own association with it. But we still 
look forward to the future, we still stretch forward 
to greater attainment. Have we still that eager- 
ness and certainty of faith that the prophets had? 
Can we stand unfaltering on the final Pisgar and 
see the Promised Land in eager vision? What the 
church needs to-day is more of the intense faith and 
trust in God that the prophets had. We need the 
faith that shall send us forward to the yet imper- 



HE DESCENDED INTO HELL 287 

feet work knowing that God will accomplish one 
more stage of it through us. We need the faith 
that can confront undaunted all the powers of this 
world in their array against the kingdom, certain 
that their triumphs are apparent merely. We need 
the faith that no Babylonian captivity can shake. 
W T e need the faith that can tear aside the curtains 
of heaven and see Jesus standing at the right hand 
of God. 

Let us, then, pray — 

For such faith; the indestructible faith of the 
prophets. Let us pray for the faith that assures us 
that we ourselves shall finally be admitted to share 
in the triumph of God. 

O God, who hast prepared for those who love 
thee such good things as pass man's understanding ; 
pour into our hearts such love towards thee, that 
we, loving thee above all things, may obtain thy 
gracious promises, which exceed all that we can de- 
sire : through Jesus Christ, our Lord. 

The death of our Lord was a truly human death. 
He underwent what we shall undergo — the sever- 
ance of soul and body. His soul passed as our 
souls shall pass — into that world where the souls of 
those who die in the Lord await the time of their 
perfecting for admission to the final joy of the 



288 MEDITATIONS ON THE APOSTLES' CREED 

saved, the Beatific Vision of God. That is what we 
mean by Our Lord's Descent into Hell. 

But when at death his soul passed to this middle 
state, it had not, as our souls, to undergo any pro- 
cess of perfecting. Rather, he went as one who 
had still a mission to fulfil for human souls. For 
his incarnate work was not only a work for those 
who lived with him and should live after him; it 
was effective also for those who had lived before. 
His redeeming work was on behalf of humanity, 
and those who had died before his coming had not 
ceased to exist or to be human that they should be 
unaffected by the redemption that he brought. Be- 
fore his coming there had been myriads of souls 
who had lived faithfully by whatever of light and 
guidance God had given them. There were many 
in Israel who had lived by faith in the promises of 
God, promises of which they had seen no fulfil- 
ment. The purpose of the Incarnation was to 
open the Kingdom of Heaven to all believers — to 
all who anywhere had accepted and lived by what 
they knew as the will of God, whether it came to 
them in the light of revelation, or whether it was 
the dimly understood whisper of their conscience. 

All these were waiting — waiting for a fuller rev- 
elation of God; and to them our Lord had a mis- 
sion to fulfil before the work that his Father had 
given him to do was fully completed. For me there 



HE DESCENDED INTO HELL 289 

is a fascination, a pathetic interest, in the thought 
of these souls — waiting in their hope and patience, 
for the coming of a deliverer. Compelled to wait 
in the unfolding of God's purpose for all humanity. 
What a sense of the oneness of God's work and of 
the oneness of humanity when we find thus that 
progress means the progress of the whole ; that the 
destiny of souls that come from the far-off times 
in the dawn of humanity, when man became a liv- 
ing soul, and the destiny of the souls to be yet born 
in some, it may be inconceivably distant, future, far 
on toward the sunset, are knit into a unity in In- 
carnate God. What almost incredible breadth it 
gives to the thought that no man liveth to himself. 
How our puny purposes are dwarfed and lost in 
the mighty purposes of God, we start to think ; but 
no, neither dwarfed nor lost, but raised in dignity 
and responsibility, as elements in the outworking 
of that sublime purpose. All humanity is one, and 
tends to a higher unity when, lifted by the power 
of the Incarnation, it shall finally reach its goal and 
God be all and in all. 

And it was a step in this far-stretching purpose 
of God that these waiting souls which had had their 
moment of vision and seen the beauty of the Prom- 
ised Land from the distant mountain peaks, and 
been faithful to that vision, should have the fruition 
of it, and see the face of him in whom they had 



290 MEDITATIONS ON THE APOSTLES^ CREED 

trusted and hoped, and be raised into participation 
in the Incarnate Life. Think, for a moment, of the 
coming of the triumphant Lord to the blessed dead ; 
to Abraham, who had gone out in reliance on the 
promise of God, to seek a country; to Moses, who 
had been found faithful in all his house, and yet 
had died in the weariness of exile; to Isaiah, to 
whom, more than to any other, it had been given 
to catch a far-off vision of his glory and of his 
sufferings; to St. John Baptist, who had perhaps 
died with a lingering doubt whether he had seen 
the Messiah, or no; to St. Joseph, whose love had 
guarded the infant years of his humanity and who 
had died in ignorance of the significance of his 
foster-child; to all these the sunrise comes, the day 
spring rises with healing in his wings, and the night 
of shadows flees away forever. 

In our own cases the middle state has somewhat 
of altered meaning. We all go there, but we go as 
Christians, with faith and hope in a Saviour who 
has come and into the unity of whose body we 
have been baptised. We go because we have not 
been free from sin and must undergo something of 
the imposed penalty. As the minds of many seem 
to be confused on this point, let us go a little into 
detail as to the teaching of the Church on this mat- 
ter of sin. 

Sin is the transgression of the will of God, and 



HE DESCENDED INTO HELL 29 1 

has as its effect the disturbance of the relation be- 
tween the soul and God and certain ill effects upon 
the soul itself. Of the effects or "penalties" of 
sin, we may distinguish two : the injury done to 
God by the disobedience of his creature which will- 
ingly scorns his love and cuts itself off from him; 
and the reaction of sin upon the sinner, in the in- 
jury done his spiritual nature through the disturb- 
ance of the harmony between it and God, and (in 
some cases) certain ill-effects of its action through 
the violation of natural or social laws. All that 
consequences of sin which is an offence against God 
we speak of as the eternal penalty of sin; all that 
concerns the injury of the human being we think 
of as the temporal penalty of sin. 

Now when we consider what forgiveness means, 
we see that it must mean the restoration of the 
normal relations between the soul and God — a 
movement of the soul towards God that we call 
repentance; and an action of God — a movement of 
God toward the soul that we call forgiveness. But 
what can God forgive? Obviously what you or I 
can forgive, an offence against himself; i. e., the 
eternal penalty of sin, the penalty of the consequence 
of which is the exclusion of the soul from the 
presence of God. This God always does forgive in 
answer to our repentance. Hell, which means the 
perpetual separation of the soul from the presence 



292 MEDITATIONS ON THE APOSTLES CREED 

of God, can only have place where there is no re- 
pentance, and, most probably, where there has been 
the destruction of the spiritual nature to a degree 
where repentance is impossible : that is, where sin 
lias been so intense as to destroy the capacity for 
union with God and the Beatific Vision. 

But it must be emphasised that forgiveness affects 
vnly the relation of the soul to God and removal 
of the eternal penalty of sin. Forgiveness in itself 
cannot affect the temporal penalty of sin except so 
far as by the restoration of the grace of God, that 
is the Divine Presence in the soul, it facilitates its 
recovery. It is necessary to stress this point be- 
cause, through misunderstanding of it, the critics of 
Christianity have taken occasion to accuse its doc- 
trine of forgiveness as immoral. As one notorious 
infidel lecturer was wont to ask dramatically : "If 
Smith owes me ten dollars, and God forgives him, 
how does that help me?" If the case happened to 
be an actual occurrence it no doubt helped him to 
the worth of much more than ten dollars in the 
applause of the gallery — but it had nothing to do 
•with the Christian doctrine of forgiveness. But it 
is not only persons of that sort who falsely accuse 
Christianity. In a recent work by one of the fore- 
most anthropologists of the day there is this state- 
ment of the Christian doctrine of recovery from 
sin : — "This comfortable doctrine teaches us that in 



HE DESCENDED INTO HELL 293 

order to blot out the effects of our misdeeds we 
have only to acknowledge and confess them with a 
lowly and penitent heart, whereupon a merciful 
God will graciously pardon our sin and absolve us. 
and ours from its consequences." It ought, one 
would think, to be elementary, even for eminent 
scientists, to be at pains to understand the religion 
that they criticise. The Christian religion, of 
course, has never taught either that the forgiveness 
of Smith involved a release from the obligation to 
pay his debt, or that God's gracious pardon of sin 
involved release from its temporal consequences. 

Christians may be a stupid race ; but they are not 
so stupid as to imagine that the moral obligations 
of man to man, which, by the way, rest on the laws 
of God, are annulled by absolution, or that absolu- 
tion sets aside the physical consequences of our 
actions. If the drunkard or the debauchee repents 
and is forgiven, no one imagines that thereupon his 
shattered nervous system is restored to soundness. 
Thank God, the penitent thief can be forgiven even 
at the last moment, as he hangs upon his cross ; but 
that does not prevent that he shall carry into Para- 
dise the memory of a wasted and a godless life. 
Nor even in the realm of the spiritual is it true that 
the forgiveness whereby God removes the eternal 
penalty of sin, removes the wounds that sin has 
inflicted on the spiritual nature. This is a fact of 



294 MEDITATIONS ON THE APOSTLES CREED 

the experience of every penitent. The penitent 
knows that spiritual wounds are slow to heal. The 
prayerless and indifferent years, though their sin is 
forgiven, carry their inevitable penalty in the diffi- 
culty we experience in building up spiritual habits. 
The spiritual struggles of those who turn to God 
from a life of godlessness bear on the face of them 
the penalty of the past. 

Now, it is no doubt true, that no soul passes out 
of the world in a state of spiritual perfection, that 
is, in a state that makes possible for it that com- 
plete union with God which is implied in the enjoy- 
ment of the Beatific Vision. If the alternative at 
death were between heaven and hell we should be 
obliged to think of the vast mass of the human racd 
taking their way to hell. But, thank God, that is 
not the teaching of the Catholic Faith. Rather we 
think of the vast mass of humanity as not having 
cut themselves off from God and destroyed their 
spiritual capacity, but as imperfect souls capable of 
spiritual training and healing. We think of them 
as passing from the world into the middle state, 
where, their sins pardoned, and freed from the lim- 
itations of this world, they may grow up to the 
state of spiritual perfection which will make it pos- 
sible for them to enter the immediate presence of 
God. The Catholic doctrine of the Middle State 
fills the future with light and hope for many of 



HE DESCENDED INTO HELL 295 

whom, without it, we should be obliged to despair. 

The statement that "we brought nothing into this 
world and certainly we shall carry nothing out," 
applies only to material things, not spiritual. It is 
certain that we brought into this world the capacity 
to know and love and serve God, and that we carry 
out of it a character that has developed this ca- 
pacity into an actuality — or annihilated it. The 
most important thing about a human being at any 
time is his character — and it is never more import- 
ant than at the moment of death. It is then the 
sole possession with which we face the conditions 
of another world. But assuming that the man has 
not destroyed all spiritual capacity and does not 
leave the world with a soul incapable of spiritual 
response ; that is, assuming that he goes to the Mid- 
dle State and not to a state of final exclusion from 
God's presence, he goes with a character that is 
capable of indefinite growth. But in view of much 
popular teaching, it is necessary to be said that 
death is not a moral miracle. What it effects is 
not a change in character, but a change in environ- 
ment. We are the same persons, with the same 
characters, an hour after death as we were an hour 
before ; only we are persons facing new circum- 
stances of existence. 

Will the new conditions involve suffering — 
many are anxious to ask. That is as you mean by 



296 MEDITATIONS ON THE APOSTLES'' CREED 

suffering — but suffering of some kind I should 
think they would necessarily involve. Neither hell 
nor the Middle State would I conceive of as a state 
of suffering in the sense of punishment inflicted 
upon the soul. I think we would do well to elimi- 
nate the notion of punishment from our thought of 
any future state of the soul. But suffering is an- 
other thing; meaning by suffering, certain neces- 
sary reactions of experience upon the soul itself. 
Suffering of some sort is involved in the conscious 
continuity of individual existence ; more particu- 
larly in the fact that we remember. We may think 
of the continuous self-consciousness of the soul as 
involving two things. In the first place it is con- 
scious of its past relations with others and of its 
sins toward them. Can you imagine the murderer 
or the slanderer not suffering from the keen pain 
of memory as he thinks of the havoc wrought by 
his actions? Can you think of the wild boy not 
filled by the agony of self-reproach as he remem- 
bers his heart-broken mother? Can you think of 
the brutal and unfaithful husband as in bliss when 
he remembers all that suffering that he caused wife 
and children? But how long shall this go on and 
how shall it ever end ? I do not know ; though, for 
myself, I like to think of it as ending in the meet- 
ing and forgiveness and renewed intercourse with 
those whom we have sinned against. 



HE DESCENDED INTO HELL 297 

Again, we may think of our continuous self- 
consciousness as involving memory of our past re- 
lation to God. The most terrible description of the 
Day of Judgment in Holy Scriptures is : "They 
shall look on him whom they pierced." To meet 
our Lord, realising the meaning and extent of his 
sacrifice for us ; and realising, too, how we have 
failed him — that must be the essential suffering of 
the future. There are few things more difficult in 
human life than to meet those whom we have 
wronged, and especially when they meet us with 
forgiveness. It is precisely the forgiveness that in- 
creases our difficulty — the sense that our sin has 
been against love — a love which even under the 
sting of our sin refuses to take offence. And it 
will appear to us in another world, if it never has 
before, that God has not taken offence. Our sins 
may have raised a wall between us and him, but it 
was a wall of our building that he always wanted 
to pass. He always wanted to forgive, and he 
meets the repentant sinner on the other side of 
death with a smile of pardon. Will not the very 
greatness of his love, at the same time that it calls 
out a passionate answer of love in us, call back, too, 
through this deathless memory, the wasted years in 
which there was only love of God for us, not love 
of us for God. The love that God never had from 
us — that will live in the burning memory. 



298 MEDITATIONS ON THE APOSTLES' CREED 

But from this, too, our growth in the knowledge 
and love of God will deliver us. For the essential 
truth about the Middle State, the certainty of it 
that requires no speculation, is that it is a state of 
growth, or progress. Character can never be a 
stagnant thing; and now that, without any of the 
hindrances that limit us here, the human being sees 
the significance of his existence — the ideal of his 
life — and sets himself to embrace it, what limita- 
tions can we imagine to his progress? Here, even 
when our desires and aspirations are of the best, 
we find that we are so hampered by the conditions 
of human life. Not only temptation and sin, but 
the fact that our lives are bound up in the life of 
our times, so that our freedom is perpetually 
checked, so that we are thwarted by lack of co- 
operation and sympathy. We feel at times that if 
only we could manage to live our own lives as we see 
them and plan them we should get on so much bet- 
ter. But we are members one of another and have 
to bear the burden of the sins and limitations of 
our fellows. But we think of the future state to 
which death shall admit us as a state of harmony 
and sympathy, where lives touch by attraction and 
are never severed by repulsion. How much that 
one fact must make for growth ! 

There, too, will be the greater knowledge — the 
greater opportunity. Ignorance is such a tremen- 



HE DESCENDED INTO HELL 299 

dous factor in our living here. We have to learn 
by the experience of life; and we never succeed 
very well in making use of the experience of 
others ; we have to work out our own. And it is 
such a blundering work ! I say we have to ; but I 
mean we choose to. After all, "we are not Robin- 
son Crusoes, the first to explore the island of hu- 
man life." The backward spiritual character that 
men carry into another state is the result of the wil- 
fulness, the stupidity, the blindness, that will not 
be taught, that will not even open its eyes to the 
conditions of human living. After all, it is possible 
to enter the Middle State well on in sanctity. There 
is a story of a shipwrecked crew that drifted for 
days in a small boat till, all their supply of water 
being exhausted, they were on the point of perish- 
ing from thirst. Then, a ship came in sight; and 
when, in answer to their signals, it drew near, they 
cried out in their agony, "Water — water." Back 
came the answer that seemed to mock their distress, 
"Dip your buckets over the side." But so it was — 
they had drifted into that part of the ocean where 
the waters of the Amazon go far out into the sea 
and they were perishing of thirst in the midst of 
an ocean of fresh water. Is that not true of men — 
that the water of life, the means of spiritual per- 
fecting, the Sacraments of the Church, are all about 
them, and they die of thirst? They go out to meet 



300 MEDITATIONS ON THE APOSTLES^ CREED 

the new conditions on the other side of death with 
an ignorance that they assume cannot be enlight- 
ened. We do not know what will happen hereafter, 
they say: but the Catholic Church knows, if they 
would listen. It knows what spiritual character is 
and how it is formed. It knows that the character 
a man has he takes with him at his death. 

But there the ignorance passes and our eyes are 
opened. What promise of progress there is in the 
fact that we shall see our life in the light of God's 
wisdom and purpose and shall be able to follow 
that purpose through all the broadening opportuni- 
ties that the new life will bring to us. For we can- 
not think of our life as in any way stagnant, a mere 
silent waiting. Our vocation there, as our vocation 
here, must still be to service. All our life here is a 
preparing, and there could be no meaning at all in 
the preparation, if in another world we should find 
no opportunity to serve. We shall still be members 
of a body with relations to all the other members, 
with opportunities still of ministering to one an- 
other. One likes to think of the saints as taking in 
hand the training of backward souls. 

We are all members of the same body, we and 
they; and although I shall have more to say later 
on of the Communion of Saints, I must anticipate 
somewhat here in speaking of the relation of those 
who are "alive" to those who are there. Love and 



HE DESCENDED INTO HELL 30I 

sympathy, particularly, are not qualities that are 
impeded in their exercise by the limitations of the 
senses ; and any conception which allows us to think 
of the Blessed Dead as beyond our love and sym- 
pathy is greatly to be deplored. For one thing, they 
are not beyond the reach of our prayers, nor we 
beyond the reach of theirs. And this communion 
through the One Head of the Body is a very real 
one. On our side of the grave we experience much 
of consolation in our sorrow when we bring the 
names of those whom we love with a love un- 
clouded and unbroken, before the Saviour of their 
souls and ours. It is a foolish question to ask — 
what can prayer do for them? — if you believe in 
intercessory prayer at all. It can do just as much 
for them as it can do for any one who is alive; it 
can show the continuance of our love and beg God 
for the grace that every human being needs for the 
conduct of his life. If they are alive, they have 
needs, and those needs are supplied by God; and 
if prayer can under any circumstances avail for 
the supply of human needs, surely it will avail for 
theirs. 

But prayer is a much broader thing than the pe- 
tition for the supply of needs. It is a mode of spir- 
itual expression. Through their prayers those who 
are in the union of the Body of Christ, I have no 
manner of doubt, exert an influence upon one an- 



3©2 MEDITATIONS ON THE APOSTLES* CREED 

other. There is an influence here of one person- 
ality upon another which is an obvious fact, though 
we are as yet unable to understand its modes. Per- 
sonality communicates with personality — thought 
touches thought. A person at a distance feels my 
influence and, at times, reads my mind. Persons 
living together are insensibly influenced, not simply 
by will and action, but in deeper ways. The more 
we are in harmony with one another, the more we 
experience that silent influence. And this influence 
is deeper and more extensive than we can realise. 
And when this influence becomes a purely spiritual 
influence as in prayer, when in its passage from 
one member of the Body to another it passes, if I 
may venture the expression, through the Head of 
the Body, may we not certainly look for an in- 
tensification of the power? We say our prayers 
for one another, not thinking perhaps of any spe- 
cific needs, but just sending out our spirit in love 
and sympathy towards them that they may in all 
things be blessed and live in union with our Lord; 
does not that bring us all — Head and members — 
together into a heightened spiritual relation in 
which spirit touches spirit, and all are filled with 
the fulness of God? In view of the fathomless 
meaning of being together "in Christ" and then 
having "all things" ours, let us not spend our en- 
ergy in petty questioning, but set ourselves to par- 
ticipation in the joys of our heritage. 



THE FIFTEENTH MEDITATION 



THE FIFTEENTH MEDITATION 

THE THIRD DAY HE ROSE AGAIN 
FROM THE DEAD 

Let us listen to the words of the Gospel — 

mOW upon the first day of the week, very- 
early in the morning, they came upon the 
sepulchre, bringing the spices that they had 
prepared . . . and they entered in and found 
not the body of the Lord Jesus. 

Let us picture to ourselves — 

These women coming to the tomb of Jesus bring- 
ing their spices for the last offices of love. They 
come in the deepest grief; we seem to see their 
tears and hear their sobs. The sepulchre was the 
sepulchre of a friend. And, then, see ! the stone is 

3o5 



3©6 MEDITATIONS ON THE APOSTLES' CREED 

rolled away! Their first thought is that the Jews 
have broken in and taken that loved body. See 
them as they doubtfully enter. The body is not 
there ! Surely it has been stolen. But there are no 
signs of desecration. There are the carefully folded 
grave-clothes. What doubt, what perplexity, what 
added grief to a grief that already seemed too great. 
And then the vision of angels. See those women 
bowing with their faces to the earth before the 
angelic presence. And then the astonishing words : 
"Why seek ye the living among the dead? He is 
not here ; he is risen." With what new hopes they 
go back — and yet with what perplexity. And among 
them were Mary Magdalene and Mary the mother 
of Jesus. With what different thoughts they had 
mourned him. But now it is the wonderful grow- 
ing joy of recovery — a joy out of which doubt was 
more and more fading. Surely it was not strange 
that he should come back to them; the strange 
thing was that they should have thought him lost! 

Consider, first — 

These women had loved Jesus in a very special 
way as only women know how to love, with a pas- 
sionate self-abandonment of their lives to him. To 
them the death of Jesus had not meant so much 
the disappointment of an ideal : — one does not think 
of the Messianic ideal as having so much hold on 



THE THIRD DAY HE ROSE AGAIN 30 7 

them as on the Apostles. It was less to them that 
the kingdom was not now to be restored to Israel. 
Rather, they had lost One in whom they trusted 
and whom they loved ; it was not a disappointment, 
it was a personal loss. Each had her own special 
feeling of loss. To the Blessed Virgin it was 
the son — that son wonderfully born, in whom 
all her hopes had centered and to whom her heart 
clung, who had vanished in death. To the Mag- 
dalen it was the rescuer who had brought a re- 
stored purity and a renewed life. In the lives of 
the other women there were personal grounds of 
gratitude and love. To them comes the angelic 
message of the restoration of the Lord. At first 
there would be no question of under what new con- 
ditions their intercourse with him would be carried 
on. The only fact of importance was that the Lord 
was alive ; that they might once more meet him and 
hear his gracious words. The love that had not 
died in their hearts throws off its oppression and 
hurries to meet the risen Saviour. 

Consider, second — 

How often our attitude before our Lord is one 
that would only be justified toward one who was 
dead and had left us to disappointment and shat- 
tered dreams. Our timid and half-hearted relig- 
ious action, our nerveless grasp on the faith, our 



308 MEDITATIONS ON THE APOSTLES' CREED 

discouragement before the problems of Christian 
living, our lack of trust before what seems a dark 
future, are really the attitude we might expect of 
those who had sadly performed the last rites over 
a loved friend and are turning in depressing grief 
from the tomb of their dead ideals. Many a life 
seems to have missed the message : He is not here, 
he is risen from the dead. If there were a real 
love of Jesus in our hearts could we ever be the 
prey, as we so often are, of doubt, discouragement, 
distress? The Lord is risen indeed. Do you not 
feel the impulse of the resurrection life kindling 
your spiritual nature ? Can you not go out to meet 
the difficulty of living in the promise of the resur- 
rection morning, in confidence of a living Master? 
Christ is risen : and because he is risen all darkness 
and hopelessness are swept away; and we go forth 
in the strength of the resurrection life, filled with 
it, possessed by it. There are no longer any doubts 
admissible; there is no longer any disheartenment 
to trouble ; there is no longer any vocation that 
cannot be filled. However justified might be a 
waning confidence in a Christ deserted by his fol- 
lowers and dying in shame a malefactor's death, all 
that is swept aside by the message of the resurrec- 
tion morning, all darkness fades before the light 
that shines from the riven tomb. 



THE THIRD DAY HE ROSE AGAIN 309 

Let us, then, pray — 

To be so filled with hope and confidence in the 
power and presence of the risen Jesus that our 
lives may respond in joyful service of him. 

Almighty God, who through thy only-begotten 
Son Jesus Christ hast overcome death, and opened 
unto us the gate of everlasting life ; we humbly be- 
seech thee that, as by thy special grace preventing 
us thou dost put into our minds good desires, so by 
thy continual help we may bring the same to good 
effect; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who liveth 
and reigneth with thee and the Holy Ghost ever, 
one God, world without end. 

As this is neither a dogmatic nor apologetic book, 
we may pass rather lightly through the tangle of 
controversies that encompass the belief in the Res- 
urrection of our Lord. Controversy usually is a 
very fruitless discussion between people who are 
not at all agreed on any premises and therefore are 
incapable of reaching a common conclusion. It is 
not to be supposed that those who do not believe in 
God, or in the divinity of our Lord, or in the possi- 
bility of miracles, will approach the evidences of 
the Resurrection in such a way that it is possible 
for them to be convinced of it. Their minds will 
undoubtedly be impressed most of all by the diffi- 



3IO MEDITATIONS ON THE APOSTLES' CREED 

culty of harmonising the traditions of the Resurrec- 
tion that are found in the New Testament. On the 
other hand, those who are Christians will be so im- 
pressed by the facts of Christianity of which they 
are in possession, that they will pay small attention 
to any difficulties of narrative. To the traveller 
who, after some centuries, tries to pick his way 
into the interior of Africa in hopes of verifying 
some old Egyptian or Greek tradition of a wonder- 
ful city lying hidden in an inaccessible valley of the 
distant mountains, it may well seem as he struggles 
through the jungles or skirts the impassable swamp, 
or hunts in vain for the hoped-for pass into the 
heart of the mountains, that the tales of the old 
chronicles are more likely to be fables than that 
men ever built their dwelling places in so inaccessi- 
ble and barren a region; but the man who has 
passed the mountains and found hospitable wel- 
come in the city, and learned to know the beauty of 
its palaces and the loving hearts of its inhabitants, 
gives small thought to the seeming contradictions 
of the narratives of the old chronicles or the unin- 
telligible routes of the old map-makers. And it 
would seem to be true that the discussions about 
our Lord's Resurrection are discussions between 
men who, with the New Testament as a new- 
bought guide book, are trying to arrive at the truth 
of the Resurrection as an historical fact by retrac- 



THE THIRD DAY HE ROSE AGAIN 3H 

ing the route that the Apostles followed in arriving 
at it; and those who, having long lived with the 
Risen Jesus as their soul's friend, are quite natur- 
ally negligent and even uninterested in the method 
by which the first experience came to be. No doubt 
there are many difficulties to be met with in the 
attempt to reconcile the Resurrection narratives, 
but that would seem to be the inevitable result of 
these being narratives and not one narrative; that 
is, of there being a number of fragmentary impres- 
sions of a great fact — impressions of many actors 
in the events set down at different times and trans- 
mitted in different ways. If there were one con- 
sistent story, no doubt it would be thrown over as 
the witness of only one person, not sufficient to 
bear the weight of the tremendous fact to which it 
testifies. As there are numbers of fragmentary ex- 
periences they are all rejected because their edges 
overlap in strange ways. But the thing that seems 
to be lost sight of is that before any of the stories 
were submitted to writing, the Resurrection itself 
had become the foundation of Christian living to 
such an extent, that no one thought of attempting, 
in documents written for Christians, to set out a 
consistent and scientific account of it, fortified by 
dates and documents, and verifiable details of time 
and place. The thing itself was too fresh in Chris- 
tian experience to need rationalistic analysis. The 



312 MEDITATIONS ON THE APOSTLES'* CREED 

very fact that as an experience the Resurrection 
was so stupefying and revolutionary, prevented any 
clear and detailed account of it, and rendered such 
an account unnecessary. 

For us, what the Resurrection essentially means 
is the resumption of activity by our Lord, who, in 
the experience of his followers, had been dead. 
We cannot conceive that the questions which 
trouble men now, so much as occurred to them. 
For this Jesus who had been dead was once more 
alive. He had been among them once more. They 
had seen his face and heard the familiar voice ; a 
relation which they had thought irreparably broken 
had been renewed. Then once more he had van- 
ished, and this time under circumstances which they 
accept as final, so far as any visible and bodily 
presence among them is concerned. But the grief 
and terror of the hours that followed the Cruci- 
fixion are not duplicated in the hours that follow 
the Ascension. There has been a fresh orientation 
of life, and they are now on the stable basis of 
those who have a definite relation to the Risen 
Jesus, and who are to go forth to proclaim him to 
the world as its Saviour. He that was dead is 
alive again, and behold, he liveth forevermore. All 
that was implied in the new relation to him and 
mission for him could not and need not be imme- 
diately known. It would emerge as they lived and 



THE THIRD DAY HE ROSE AGAIN 313 

met the exigencies of their mission under the guid- 
ance of the Holy Spirit. 

That mission defined itself as the establishment 
of a community — a brotherhood — a church. And 
as we put ourselves back at their point of departure 
and watch the unfolding of the apostolic work, we 
come to see why it is that what is called a "spiritual 
Resurrection" of Jesus in no wise forms an intelli- 
gible basis of that work. To think of the Spirit of 
Jesus as after the Resurrection manifesting itself 
in the consciousness of the Apostles so that they 
came to understand that though dead he was still 
alive and acting in them and with them, but not 
risen in the sense of having resumed the Body, in 
no wise answers to what they actually did. They 
went out to preach the Resurrection; and they did 
not preach a "spiritual" Resurrection, but a bodily 
one. They preached that with the more emphasis 
as they came to understand more clearly that to 
become a Christian was not to accept a certain body 
of facts or to mould character in accordance with 
a certain body of ethical teaching, but to be put in 
a certain relation to the Risen Jesus, to be grafted 
into his Body and live by his Incarnate Life. To- 
day perhaps more than ever before, it is being in- 
sisted that Christianity is not doctrine but life ; but 
by life is usually meant not life at all, but a certain 
ethical habit of action, a certain obedience to moral 



314 MEDITATIONS ON THE APOSTLES' CREED 

ideals in our social relations. This has no resemb- 
lance at all to what the Christian Scriptures mean 
by life. By life they mean a new vitality which is 
the outcome of being put into living union with the 
humanity of the Risen Jesus, conceived as the me- 
dium through which the life of God flows out to 
the life of men. The life which the Apostles taught 
depends on the present existence of the Incarnate 
Redeemer, and our contact with him — our being in 
him. "In Christ" is the most characteristic phrase 
of the Apostolic teaching; and by "in Christ" they 
mean a literal incorporation into the Incarnate 
Body which takes into its unity each soul that is 
regenerated in Christ Jesus. 

Such teaching implies of course a view of the 
Resurrection Body of our Lord as having under- 
gone a marked change in the fact of the Resurrec- 
tion. Without ceasing to be a body, and a body in 
some sense continuous with the body of his humili- 
ation, the body of Jesus after the Resurrection 
shows by its action that it has undergone deep 
modifications. It has become now the centre of 
spiritual activities in a way that the pre-Resurrec- 
tion body could not be — it has become utterly domi- 
nated by the life of the Spirit. We have to regard 
the appearance of the body after the Resurrection 
as not the natural appearance of a material object 
but as a thing willed, a certain accommodation to 



THE THIRD DAY HE ROSE AGAIN 315 

the needs of the Apostles. Buft the Resurrection 
body is capable of activities which are not possible 
for "natural" bodies. It is evidently dependent 
upon the spiritual will, appearing or disappearing as 
our Lord chooses, moving without regard to mater- 
ial obstacles and now in its moments of manifesta- 
tion obviously impressing those who see it as 
changed in some respects from the body they had 
known. He plainly impresses them with a sense of 
mystery which is quite unlike the terror and awe 
that would be inspired by the return of one who 
haa? been dead, and which shows no sign of wear- 
ing off with increased familiarity. We cannot un- 
derstand this new condition of the body; we can 
only describe it as one that shows the body as the 
focus of a certain spiritual activity; the spiritual 
energy of our Lord's personality still reaches the 
Apostles mediated by the body. We understand 
that it would reach them as truly if, through conde- 
scension, the body were not made visible. That 
our Lord was visible after the Resurrection was 
obviously for evidential purposes, not of the es- 
sence of his still being incarnate. 

The Apostles then, went out to preach the Res- 
urrection, not so much as an evidential fact, though 
as such it was of supreme value, not so much to 
base the authority of their preaching on the his- 
torical fact of the Resurrection, though they neces- 



3I<5 MEDITATIONS ON THE APOSTLES' CREED 

sarily did that; but they went out to proclaim to 
men the possibility of a new life through incorpora- 
tion with the living Jesus. What they preached 
was justification, the deliverance from sin; and to 
be justified meant to them, not to see life from an- 
other point of view and the shaping of one's ac- 
tions in accordance with it, but the becoming of 
new creatures by the participation in the life of our 
Lord. Sinners are promised the forgiveness of 
their sins, not by judicial decree because of their 
repentance and faith in the work of Christ, but by 
sacramental action in that their repentance led 
them to such action as resulted in their being so 
acted on by God that as the result they are "in 
Christ," partakers of his Death and Resurrection 
because they are one with him. To put it in an- 
other way: the Resurrection is not an historic fact 
to which we look back with faith, but a present 
dynamic fact by the action of which we are regen- 
erated. 

This conception of Christianity is absolutely dif- 
ferent from that which conceives our Lord's life- 
work as resulting in an example, a perfect speci- 
men of human living, that we are to imitate and 
which we are to multiply in more or less illegible 
copies to the end of time. The conception of God 
as a schoolmaster who has written on the black- 
board of the universe a perfect sentence that all 



THE THIRD DAY HE ROSE AGAIN 317 

men are to spend their lives writing off into the 
notebook of their experience is not exhilerating. 
There are few things so barren as a great example. 
It may give a certain direction to impulse, if the 
impulse is already there. But an example as such, 
is quite incapable of producing any result. The 
world was not perishing for lack of examples when 
Christ came. The examples of Abraham and Moses 
and Isaiah had not saved Judaism. The trouble 
about an example is that there is no power in it to 
force its execution. The boy wishes to be a sculp- 
tor. Do you set him down before a statue of 
Michael angelo and say, "Well, there is one of the 
greatest statues of the world — copy that"? A man 
feels that he is the slave of sin. What is the good 
of showing him the life of a saint ? That is merely 
saying to him, "There are people who are not like 
you." That is no news to the sinner. What he 
wants is not knowledge, but power. And the Chris- 
tianity that the Apostles preached was power. They 
said to men : "You are sinners" — and there was no 
revelation in that. The human conscience had suf- 
ficiently testified to the fact. But they added : 
"There is in existence a power which will enable 
you to overcome sin — the power of the Risen 
Jesus." Then men listened. They went on : "Be 
baptised and wash away your sins and ye shall re- 
ceive the gift of the Holy Ghost." Then men acted. 



318 MEDITATIONS ON THE APOSTLES* CREED 

And the meaning of baptism and the gift of the 
Holy Ghost was that by them men were born again 
and made living members of the Risen Jesus. 

The Church, it is commonly said, is founded on 
the Resurrection. Like all such summings up, the 
saying presents only one phase of truth. What it 
really means is that the Apostles preached a living, 
not a dead Christ. They went out not to found 
philosophical schools for the propagation of a doc- 
trine, but to lead men to forgiveness of sins and 
newness of life through relationship to a living 
Saviour. His resurrection has demonstrated his 
saving power in that it manifests his triumph over 
death and hell, and exhibits him as the new head 
of humanity. The good news that the Christian 
missionaries had to proclaim was the news of the 
possible liberation of men from the slavery of sin. 
"Christ being raised from the dead dieth no more" 
— so ran the message — "for in that he died, he died 
unto sin once for all ; but in that he liveth, he liveth 
unto God." All through the Apostles' teaching 
there runs a note of recent triumph. We seem to 
read the minds of the first Christians as those of 
men who have but recently escaped from imminent 
danger. As they look back to their preceding life, 
it is with a shudder, almost with a gasp of relief, 
as of men finding themselves unexpectedly saved 
from some threatening disaster. They have been 



THE THIRD DAY HE ROSE AGAIN 319 

snatched from the very jaws of death; and their 
relief is not the less but rather greater in that the 
revelation of the danger was almost coincident with 
the escape. A man snatched back from the crumb- 
ling edge of a precipice finds himself saved in the 
same moment that he realises his almost disaster; 
but his breath stops and his being is dissolved in 
trembling at the thought of the rocks below that 
were ready to receive him. Over and over again 
those early Christians recur to the horrors of the 
heathen life from which they have been drawn. St. 
Paul recurs again and again to the long roll of sins 
which had been characteristic of the old life. "Dead 
in trespasses and sins," is the summing up of it. 
"Without God in the world," was its essential hor- 
ror. The song of thankfulness rises, wave upon 
wave, as they think of the past. "Through Jesus 
Christ our Lord," is their explanation of the man- 
ner of it. One pictures the little group of Chris- 
tians in any community, as they gathered together 
in the early dawning, to receive the Bread from 
Heaven, and to "sing hymns to Christ as God," as 
before all else joyful. The thrill of their deliver- 
ance was still in their souls; the wonder of their 
redemption was still fresh to them; their exultant 
experience of the redeeming power of the Risen 
Jesus translated itself into hymns of praise. Per- 
haps the mysterious speaking with tongues which 



320 MEDITATIONS ON THE APOSTLES' CREED 

was so frequent in the first Christian assemblies 
was but experience become so vivid as to be inar- 
ticulate. So we feel the progress of Christianity 
through the first century in the sense of a boundless 
life — life everywhere manifesting itself in its power 
to sweep men from the old sins, to reconstruct 
character, to take from the slave the weight of his 
chains, to make the freedman rejoice in that he has 
become the bond-servant of Christ, to shatter old 
habits and old relations and to incarnate itself in 
those who under its touch become new creatures 
in Christ Jesus — "The power of an endless life" is 
what we feel working everywhere. 

And that — is it not? — is one of the most charac- 
teristic differences between their Christianity and 
ours! We say to ourselves that it cannot well be 
otherwise. Christianity comes to us under quite 
other conditions. We, for the most part, are no 
longer converted to it; we are born to it; we live 
not as heathen, for it is a Christian world. We 
grow up with a sense of Christian obligation and 
service, and we cannot expect the abounding joy 
that came with the experience of a new deliverance 
that transforms all the world. 

All of which looks true enough, though I believe 
it to be profoundly untrue. In the first place, we 
are not born into a Christian world — there is no 
such thing. Even here in America, which we speak 



THE THIRD DAY HE ROSE AGAIN 32 1 

of as a Christian country, we are born into a so- 
ciety which is in many respects profoundly hostile 
to Christianity, and which creates an environment 
which not the wildest imagination can regard as 
favourable to Christian growth. More than half 
of the population do not belong to any Christian 
body of any sort ; and of those who do, an immense 
number are only nominal Christians, and detract 
from, rather than add to, the strength of the Chris- 
tian community. It is no gain that the line of 
demarcation between the Church and the world 
has become so blurred that we no longer experi- 
ence much change in passing from the one to the 
other; that indeed we are not quite sure what we 
could mean by "Christian society." We have 
agreed, tacitly, outside of our actual assemblies in 
Church, to sink all differences and disregard all 
divisions — we have arrived at an understanding 
that the only way to conduct life successfully under 
present conditions, is to ignore religion outside of 
the walls of churches, and actually to oppose it, if 
it threatens to raise its head in "secular affairs." 
So there is peace between the Church and the world 
so profound that we have ceased even to think of 
possible frontiers. It can hardly be contended that 
this is a conversion of the world ; it can hardly be 
contended that American society as constituted is a 
better training ground for Christianity than the 



322 MEDITATIONS ON THE APOSTLES' CREED 

Roman Empire when Christianity made its first 
impact on the world. Christianity had a much bet- 
ter opportunity of making disciples of strong and 
definite character when a man's profession of Christ 
marked him as a member of a body definitely hos- 
tile to many of the habits and practices of the time, 
than under conditions in which any strictness of 
life marks a man, even among our fellow Chris- 
tians, as being somewhat peculiar or unnecessarily 
strict. It is difficult to find anywhere in the mod- 
ern society any sense of an opposition between 
Church and world, or indeed any feeling of a re- 
ligious sense attaching to the world. Worldliness 
has come to mean for most people, one imagines, 
indulgence in practices that they themselves cannot 
afford. 

The difficulty of living a Christian life is, there- 
fore, not less but greater, under our conditions. 
And the sense of escape, of deliverance, of rescue, 
has faded out of modern experience, not because 
there is no longer anything to be delivered from, 
but because we do not care to be delivered from it. 
There are no less sins in the modern world than in 
the ancient; and we have no less need to be deliv- 
ered from them. We no less need that the experi- 
ence of a true conversion should come to pass in 
our lives ; a conversion which shall be the realising 
of our lives as definitely Christian, with motive, 



THE THIRD DAY HE ROSE AGAIN 323 

aims, ends, that are radically different from those 
of the unconverted. You cannot inherit Chris- 
tianity, so that you need no conversion to it. You 
may be baptised into Christ and brought up under 
Christian discipline and Christian obedience. In 
such a case there is not the perception of a new 
way of life, the acceptance of an offered salvation 
which you had not known of before. But in even 
the best trained life there needs must come the 
time when the Religion of Christ must be recog- 
nised, not as conformity to rules and principles, 
that we have learned, but as a distinct personal ex- 
perience — the experience of a relation to the Risen 
Jesus. If your religion is to be a living thing, there 
must come a time when you pass from the accept- 
ance of the truths you have learned to the personal 
possession of them in a vital experience. This may 
happen suddenly or it may happen slowly — the im- 
portant thing is that it happens, and that in the 
happening you realise yourself as a sinner redeemed 
by the Blood of Christ and now alive by his life. 
The birth of personal religion, the religion of ex- 
perience, as contrasted with the religion of habit, 
is as needful to-day as any form of conversion was 
in the early ages of the Church. The joy that ran 
through the world at the first preaching of the 
Gospel was, we are born to newness of life through 
the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead: 



324 MEDITATIONS ON THE APOSTLES' CREED 

and the reason that to-day we so little find the joy 
of religion is because we have not passed from 
passive acceptance of truths we have heard to the 
active experience of them as power in life. As we 
look out on Christendom to-day, is not the thing 
that is conspicuously lacking, just the sense of 
Christianity as power? We conceive it as decency 
of conduct, to a certain degree as obligation, per- 
haps even as privilege; but do we conceive it as 
power, as driving force, as a new energy which 
makes life vivid with its activity? Is our Chris- 
tian life a life swept along by the power of the 
Resurrection? Do we feel that the love of Christ 
constraineth us? Is the conviction present to us 
that just because we are Christians we are not 
tamely to acquiesce in the conventions of society, 
but to build up a life-experience that is based on 
quite other ideals? 

There is something the matter with our presenta- 
tion of Christianity. Men are growing tired of 
Christianity, we are told; they are becoming con- 
vinced that its role in the world is played out ; that 
like all preceding religions it has had its time of 
energy and growth when it answered to and sup- 
plied certain needs of men ; but that time has passed 
and it is now entering upon its period of decadence. 
What has produced this feeling, unless it is that we 
have ceased to present Christianity as redeeming 



THE THIRD DAY HE ROSE AGAIN 325 

and renewing power? Men have not ceased to sin, 
they have not ceased to experience the effects of 
sin, they have found no new religion that is an 
effective substitute for the Gospel. They have even 
found in these last years that the science to which 
they looked so hopefully half a century ago as a 
probable deliverer, has nothing to say to the deeper 
needs of life. Why then should Christianity lose 
its appeal? Is it not that we have ceased to make 
its real appeal and have substituted for it some- 
thing that we thought would be more effective be- 
cause less offensive to men Have we not been 
making Christianity popular and dropping the doc- 
trines that offended the natural man till the Gospel 
in our hands has lost its power? We have been 
meeting the demands of modern conditions, we 
thought, and now the modern person turns on us 
with the complaint that we are not even amusing! 
That we do not compete in any town or village 
with other forms of amusement! This surely is 
Nemesis ! 

Let us go back in our own lives, at any rate, if 
we have drifted from that standpoint, to meditate 
on the resurrection of Jesus as the revelation of 
renewing power; power that is able to lay hold 
upon our lives and energise them in such wise that 
they shall be filled with the joy and peace of believ- 
ing; so filled because we have found in the Risen 



326 MEDITATIONS ON THE APOSTLES' CREED 

Jesus the gift of pardon and the gift of life ; pardon 
which has swept away all its sins and filled it with 
the joy of deliverance; life which sends it out into 
the world as a centre of living service, glad to spend 
and be spent in the service of its Risen Master. 



THE SIXTEENTH MEDITATION 



THE SIXTEENTH MEDITATION 

AND ASCENDED INTO HEAVEN 
Let us listen to the words of St. Luke — 



mi 



HILE they beheld, he was taken up; 
and a cloud received him out of their 
sight. 



Let us picture — 

The Apostles watching the cloud into which 
Jesus had vanished. How wonderful had been 
those forty days since his resurrection, and how 
much that was new about Jesus and his relation to 
them they had learned. They had learned that the 
human relation to which they had been accustomed 
was being transformed. They could not have ex- 
pected to keep the Risen Lord with them : they 

3 2 9 



33° MEDITATIONS ON THE APOSTLES' CREED 

would be prepared, not only by his own words but 
by their new knowledge of him, for such a fact as 
this. The wonder with which they watched him 
vanish would speedily give way to sense of lone- 
liness and desolation. Not the disappointment, the 
sense of crushed hopes, that followed Calvary; but 
a sense of being thrown back on their own re- 
sources in the work that they now understood lay 
before them. They could not yet understand the 
restoration of his Presence which would be effected 
through the action of the Holy Spirit. See them 
standing there not quite realising that this is the 
last sight of Jesus ; but the feeling that it is grows, 
and with it grows the pain. But God does not 
leave them uncomforted: there is the coming of 
the angels and their exhortation to activity. Why 
stand ye gazing up into heaven : this same Jesus 
shall come again. Yes, he shall come again; but in 
what a different way. And how much there is for 
them to do before he come. They have to prepare 
the world for the Second Advent. 

Consider, first — 

Their attitude toward Jesus had been one of 
growing appreciation. He had attracted them, no 
doubt, in the first place, by his winning personality. 
One can imagine that those with whom our Lord 
talked for a few hours would be bound forever to 



AND ASCENDED INTO HEAVEN 33 1 

him. Think, for instance, of the experience of St. 
John and St. Andrew on that day when, as they 
were talking with St. John Baptist, they looked on 
Jesus as he walked, and the Baptist said, "Behold 
the Lamb of God," and the two disciples followed 
Jesus and abode with him that day. What a mar- 
vellous experience! With what passionate devo- 
tion they came away ! They had no doubt that they 
had found the Messiah. The experience of the 
years that followed would have developed on two 
lines. There was the friend whose life and thought 
and love and guidance meant ever more to them, 
became ever more needful, so that they could not 
conceive life separated from him. And then there 
was the deepening sense of the mystery of their 
friend. His relation to God it became plain was 
quite other than theirs. He made the Father known 
to them, but he did not need that any should make 
the Father known to him; he knew the Father in 
some direct personal way that they could not even 
conceive. He derived from the Father that incal- 
culable power that enabled him to speak as never 
man spake, and to do what it trascended the power 
of man to do. They would have become accus- 
tomed to this transcendence of ordinary humanity 
which was constantly making itself felt in his acts 
and words. His mystery would have deepened as 
he disappointed their Messianic hopes and entered 



33 2 MEDITATIONS ON THE APOSTLES' CREED 

on the work of his passion: it was unspeakably 
deepened by the experiences of the resurrection 
and the days following. And yet those days that 
led up to and culminated in the Ascension were the 
beginning of an understanding of him which, in 
the light of Pentecost, became an illuminating 
reconciliation : their friend and mysterious teacher, 
whom they had thought might be the Messiah, was 
indeed God made man. 

Consider, second — 

In our experience of Jesus we start, as it were, 
from the other end: from a belief in the Incarna- 
tion of the Second Person of the Blessed Trinity, 
from the belief in the existence of One, enthroned 
in heavenly places, who bears there our nature, a 
nature that he has assumed that he might live 
among men and enter into human experience. The 
Apostles had to learn the seemingly impossible les- 
son that this intimate friend with whom they ate 
and drank and walked about the streets of Judean 
cities and through the country roads of Galilee was 
Eternal God. They had to see their friend trans- 
formed before their eyes, and yet to hold fast to 
the fact that in finding a God they were not losing 
a friend. We have what is, no doubt, the harder 
task : having started with God Incarnate, to con- 
ceive the fact that he is also our friend; to learn 



AND ASCENDED INTO HEAVEN 333 

that it is possible for us to abide with him and 
have an intercourse more unspeakably real and 
close than that of the Apostles when they talked 
with him ; to have a communion more intimate than 
theirs, through the medium of the nature that we 
share with him; because it is no longer that the 
divine Son has come to earth to share the toils, 
the sorrows, the temptations of men, but that we, 
because he has triumphantly passed through human 
experience, and conquered the sin that had con- 
quered man, and is risen and ascended and sitteth 
at the right hand of God, are raised up to dwell 
with him in heavenly places. The dynamic centre 
of our life henceforth is in its union with the as- 
cended Jesus, through whom we receive, not simply 
the impulse of a communicated power, but the 
living energy of a personal presence. The Apos- 
tles moved through friendship to an experience of 
divinity: we move from a conviction of divinity to 
an achieved friendship. 

Let us, then, pray — 

That we may not look up into the clouds of 
heaven for a vanished and inaccessible God, but 
that we may so embrace him by faith and love that 
we may find our true life in communion with him. 

Grant, we beseech thee, Almighty God, that like 
as we do believe thy only begotten Son our Lord 



334 MEDITATIONS ON THE APOSTLES CREED 

Jesus Christ to have ascended into the heavens; so 
we may also in heart and mind thither ascend, and 
with him continually dwell, who liveth and reigneth 
with thee and the Holy Ghost, one God, world 
without end. 



We think of the Apostles as going back to Jeru- 
salem from the Mount of the Ascension with heavy 
hearts. However much their minds may have been 
illumined during these last days; however much 
they may have grown in understanding of our Lord 
and of the meaning of his work; however much 
they may have been prepared for this separation; 
it would still bring with it the sense of great loss. 
We may think that we are prepared for separation 
from a friend whom we love, and indeed have so 
represented this event to ourselves as to be ready 
for it — be reconciled to it, as we say — and yet the 
actual coming of death is not without its shock. 
We may have the most intense faith in the resump- 
tion of personal relations in the future, and still 
feel that they will not be just these relations that 
are severed now. The subtle shadings of our 
friendly relations, the delicate interplay of sympa- 
thetic personalities, was called out by just these 
circumstances in which we have grown together. 
The future may hold other and deeper and more 
significant relations for us, but it cannot repeat just 



AND ASCENDED INTO HEAVEN 335 

these ; and so the shadow falls on this parting. And 
fell, we may be sure, on the hearts of the Apostles, 
and would remain there till the old relation was 
merged in the new: would remain there, indeed, 
always as a priceless memory that nothing ever re- 
placed. It comes down to us in the intimate per- 
sonal touches that the attentive reader of the Gos- 
pels is so familiar with, actual notes of the day's 
experience, we feel as we read them. It was this 
past that was broken with when the cloud received 
him out of their sight. 

But that sense of personal loss being granted, we 
can look at the Ascension in its universal signifi- 
cance. The Ascension did not really remove our 
Lord from the Apostles; rightly considered it 
brought him nearer to them — but it did consummate 
a change of relations that had been initiated at the 
Resurrection. Henceforth our Lord's relation to 
humanity is that of One who has vindicated his 
right to be and to act as its Head. In union with 
him human nature has won its battle and in him 
takes its place at the right hand of God. His rela- 
tion to men henceforth is that of Head to members, 
a relation of mutual indwelling, the consequence of 
participation in the same life. 

For the Ascension is not, we need not remind 
ourselves, the resumption by the Son of his pre- 
incarnate state — that state that was his with the 



33*> MEDITATIONS ON THE APOSTLES' CREED 

Father before the world was. As Divine Son, as 
Eternal and glorious Logos, he had never left that 
state. Rather, the Ascension means the entering 
into the Heavenly Places of the Incarnate Son. The 
manhood assumed by God is now eternally glori- 
fied and made the permanent channel of mediation 
between God and man. As God's approach to us 
for the purpose of redemption was through the as- 
sumed manhood, so our approach to him for pur- 
poses of sanctification is through the same man- 
hood. The bond remains eternally because the rela- 
tion that depends upon it is eternal. There is no 
limit to the need of mediation. 

This conception of the permanence of the As- 
cended Manhood as the medium of divine activity, 
is absolutely vital to the Catholic conception of 
Christianity. Here again the same fact that I 
touched upon in the last meditation emerges, that 
what is called a "spiritual" Resurrection, that is, 
the resumption by our Lord of his pre-incarnate 
state, negatives the entire teaching of the Christian 
religion of the relation of God and man. A Chris- 
tianity that has no place for God Incarnate in the 
heavens is a maimed Christianity — a Christianity 
that makes all the subsequent methods of God's 
dealing with men as they are described in the New 
Testament inconceivable. We may very easily test 
the types of religion that are offered to us by the 



AND ASCENDED INTO HEAVEN 337 

place that they find for the Ascended Humanity of 
Christ. 

That type of Christianity, for instance, that we 
have had to comment upon several times already, 
which conceives of Christianity as an ethical life 
deriving its impulses from the example of our Lord, 
plainly has no place for an Ascended Humanity. 
The purpose of the Incarnation was to show men 
how to live, and that being done, the purpose 
served by the body of Christ was finished. It would 
be a mere impertinence in the heavenly world. Our 
present relation to our Lord might be summed up 
in the word prayer. We pray to God and God 
answers our prayers. He helps us, in some indefi- 
nite way, to lead the life of imitation of his Son. 
This conception of Christianity contains no thought 
of a present action of God on humanity through 
the humanity which he assumed. Indeed one does 
not quite see why God should have become Incar- 
nate at all. It seems more in accord with the prob- 
abilities of things — and this type of religion is find- 
ing it so in an increasing degree — to fall back on 
the notion that Jesus Christ was not God at all, 
but a specially endowed man. 

Again, there is another and higher type of Chris- 
tianity which still fails to meet the test of the As- 
cension. It conceives man as in constant need of 
the help of God — of his grace; but it conceives of 



33 8 MEDITATIONS ON THE APOSTLES* CREED 

that grace as something imposed from the outside; 
that is, an external influence brought to bear on 
our nature. I am afraid that this is the common 
notion of the action of God. This type of religion 
takes full account of the work of Christ — the In- 
carnation and Atonement as removing certain bar- 
riers and assuring for us the possibility of forgive- 
ness and access to the Father. But that has been 
done. And from that point on one sees no reason 
why the Incarnation persists. God now acts di- 
rectly on the individual soul in response to peni- 
tence and prayer. This type of religion shows its 
essential nature in one of its favourite sayings : — 
// will tolerate nothing between the soul and God. 
It rejects the Catholic conception of the Sacra- 
ments, precisely on the ground that they are intru- 
sions. That there should be a Real Presence of 
the Humanity of Jesus in the Sacrament of the 
Altar whereby he enters into the soul and uniting 
himself with it, makes his abode there; that there 
should be an action of the Incarnate Jesus through 
the ministry of his priests in the forgiveness of sin, 
this is the interposition of something between the 
soul and God. 

No doubt; but the thing interposed is precisely 
that which God interposed there when he took 
human nature — the sacred humanity of Christ. If 
it is not interposed there permanently, not as a 



AND ASCENDED INTO HEAVEN 339 

barrier between the soul and God, but as the chan- 
nel of God's action upon the soul, then the whole 
notion of the Incarnation is otiose and the Ascen- 
sion and Session at the Right Hand of God incon- 
ceivable. The Catholic religion conceives no facts 
of the Creed in this barren and pedantic way. It 
conceives them as meaningful and dynamic facts. 
If Christ ascended into the heavens in our nature 
that he assumed at his Incarnation, it is because 
that nature is now useful; because action constantly 
originates in it. If the Son of God now bears our 
nature it is because the bearing of it is necessary 
for the work that he is now doing. 

And we are permitted to understand something 
of this necessity. We understand that the work of 
Christ now is not the influencing of people to keep 
rules of some kind ; or the work of supplementing 
their efforts to live a certain kind of life by the 
addition to them of a certain external power; but 
the creation of a manhood indwelt by God. The 
redemptive process constantly realises itself in the 
world by God, through the medium of Incarnate 
Christ, entering into the souls of men and taking 
their manhood into God. There is a constant com- 
munication to men, not of some vague thing called 
grace, but of the Incarnate nature of Christ, to the 
end that redeemed man, so indwelt, may realise in 
his own life the fruits of his redemption. The 



34° MEDITATIONS ON THE APOSTLES' CREED 

permanent Incarnation thus finds its meaning as a 
permanent channel of communication between the 
divine and the human, and is the permanent means 
of union, the means by which man is even now 
lifted up to dwell with Christ in heavenly places. 

This is the truth that throbs through the whole 
New Testament, not the truth of our rescue, but of 
our exaltation. Humanity being in Christ, is lifted 
up to dwell with him in heavenly places; and this 
not in some vaguely "spiritual" sense, by which 
men usually intend a harmony of thought and 
feeling, but by an actual incorporation in Christ, 
which effects that our life essentially is where the 
dynamic centre of it is. That Christ dwells in us 
and we in him is, no doubt, a spiritual fact, but that 
does not mean that it is less than a fact — a figure 
of speech. 

In the light of this fact the Sacraments assume 
a significance that they cannot otherwise have. 
Dissociated from the Ascended Humanity of Jesus, 
the Sacraments can be, at most, suggestive rites. 
And that, naturally, is what they become in relig- 
ious systems that have no place for the Ascension. 
And because apart from any connection with the 
humanity of our Lord they are, in fact, not very 
suggestive, they tend more and more to become 
pieces of antiquated symbolism. The lesser Sacra- 
ments are incontinently dropped out of such sys- 



AND ASCENDED INTO HEAVEN 341 

terns of religion and the greater are retained, one 
fancies, because the direction of them is so explicit 
in the New Testament. But their importance is 
minimized and denied. They cease to be regarded 
as channels of grace. 

And again: the notion of grace which is per- 
fectly definite and comprehensible from the Catho- 
lic point of view, tends to evacuate all meaning 
from any other — tends to become mere indefinite 
influence which has no necessary relation to the 
Incarnation. It has to be assumed that God acts 
for us in some way, but it is also assumed that if 
we say that it is in such and such ways, we are 
again interposing something between the soul and 
God and limiting his power. It is assumed that if 
we attach God's grace to certain prescribed acts 
we are reducing religion to magic. No doubt, if 
we were prescribing the acts ; we might then regard 
them as incantations of some sort. But the whole 
gist of the contention is that we have prescribed 
nothing; that the prescription comes from God, as 
so unquestionably it does in the two greater Sacra- 
ments at any rate; and that further, the meaning 
of the prescription is plain enough — that through 
them the Incarnate God comes into our lives. 
Grace is not a vague influence, but the presence of 
the Incarnate in the soul, working there that he 
may transform us into new men moulded in the 



34 2 MEDITATIONS ON THE APOSTLES CREED 

image of Christ Jesus. Sacramental action is not 
imposed stress but indwelling presence; it is a 
method of action that altogether harmonises with 
God's treatment of humanity from the moment of 
the Incarnation. If the complete meaning of re- 
ligion is the union of Creator and creature in an- 
other life, we can see why the method of the Sac- 
raments should be persisted in, not abandoned. 

Again : our Lord, throned in heavenly places, 
continues that sacrificial action begun in his earthly 
work. He ever liveth to make intercession for us ; 
and this intercession of his humanity is based upon 
his sacrificial action — it is summed up in his pre- 
sentation of himself as sacrificial. His sacrifice was 
not a temporal act performed on the Cross to 
which we look back with grateful memory. He is 
still to-day a sacrifice for the sins of the world — 
one sacrifice forever, a sacrifice that has no end. 
So to-day we still approach God "through Jesus 
Christ our Lord"; we plead before God the still- 
existing sacrifice of his Son. The mediatorial work 
of our Lord was only begun during his earthly life ; 
it has been going ever since with an increasing 
extension. Whenever to-day the Sacrifice of the 
Altar is offered there is the presentation and plead- 
ing of his mediatorial work. The action of heaven 
is presented in the action of the Church, where the 
same Incarnate Saviour offers the same sacrifice 



AND ASCENDED INTO HEAVEN 343 

because he himself is then present both as priest 
and victim ; and because of this, the sacrifice of the 
Altar is not some new sacrifice but one and the 
same sacrifice that our Lord always offers, for 
there is no other. There is a memorial of his 
Death and Passion made before the Father, but 
what is presented to the Father is Christ Sacrificed, 
Risen and Ascended, as he abides to-day and for- 
ever. The presence on the Altar and the presence 
in heaven are not two, are not substance and 
shadow, are not reality and picture, but one. 

Because all these things are so, the centre of our 
spiritual life and activity is in heaven. Our spir- 
itual life is the manifestation of that eternal life of 
Jesus which is communicated to us through our 
inherance in him. The movement of our lives 
now is toward the heavenly places where Christ 
sits at the right hand of God. We seek those 
things that are above. This shifting of the centre 
of interest from earth to heaven, from the material 
to the spiritual, is that much denounced other- 
worldliness which has been for some time now the 
reproach of Christians, under the sting of which 
many Christians have tried to shift the centre of 
activity once again to the world. To do so is sheer 
disaster. I do not know why we should seek to 
deny this fact or to obscure it, that it is character- 
istic of Christians that they seek a country. One 



344 MEDITATIONS ON THE APOSTLES' CREED 

is quite naturally more vitally interested in the 
concerns of that country where one hopes to spend 
the eternal years than in those of a place where 
one is but a sojourner — a pilgrim and a stranger; 
just as one is quite naturally more interested in the 
affairs of the earthly city where one dwells than in 
that in which one only passes the night. One makes 
shift to put up with the inconveniences of the 
temporal, but one is careful to adjust oneself to the 
eternal. 

But the critics of other-worldliness miss the fact 
that the temporal life of the Christian and his eter- 
nal life are not two diverse things separated in 
time and place, but that the Christian is living the 
eternal life now. It is not that his conversation 
will be in heaven, but that it is now there. The 
Christian is developing now under the conditions 
of the present human life, and his discipline is now 
being carried out under the conditions of human 
society here. His vocation is to display here the 
qualities of eternal life, and in proportion as he 
does so, his surroundings are changed for the bet- 
ter. It can hardly be contended that one who 
strives to live the life of the Beatitudes here is 
making the world worse ; what is contended is that 
the world is now so bad that it is difficult to live 
the life there. But the world will grow better as 
it has in it more of purity and peaceableness ; more 



AND ASCENDED INTO HEAVEN 345 

of self-sacrifice and less of self-seeking; that is, as 
human life is affected by heavenly motives. We 
are much pressed by the conception of "useful 
members of society," and we assert that usefulness 
is an ideal to strive for. Only one is inclined some- 
times to examine the notion of usefulness. Is it so 
clear, as seems to be assumed, that the honest 
tradesman, let us say, who sells groceries at the 
shop at the corner, and so makes money for the 
support of himself and family, is more useful than 
the man who passes his time in prayer for the con- 
version of the world ? It is at least conceivable that 
the latter exerts a higher and farther-reaching in- 
fluence for good than the former. That, in any 
case, is the Christian's contention. We believe that 
this universe is fundamentally a spiritual system, 
governed by spiritual forces ; and that the man who 
is on the side of the spiritual forces, whose life is 
in harmony with them, is the really useful man. 
We in this country have seen the failure of too 
many attempts to improve humanity, based on the 
assumption that all man needs to make him better 
is more knowledge of material fact, to have any 
further confidence in the method. We are con- 
vinced that all true improvement of humanity has 
in the past, and will be in the future, the result not 
of increasing knowledge of material fact, but of 
increase in the perceptions of spiritual values. We 



34^ MEDITATIONS ON THE APOSTLES' CREED 

believe that even now the righteous man is a better 
citizen than the clever man, and that the saint is 
worth more to society in the long run than the 
philanthropist; that all that is of any worth what- 
ever in the ideals of those who would reform so- 
ciety are the elements of the life that is lived with 
Christ in God which the Church has been insisting 
on for 2,000 years. 

For harmony with God means harmony with his 
work, wherever we may be, not harmony with 
some future work. Our participation in the Risen 
Life of Jesus means participation in his interests 
now; in the transformation of this world into the 
kingdom of God. The human bond that unites us 
to him answers a communion of love and sympathy 
that reveals to us the meaning of his present activ- 
ity. "I call you friends" — is one of his sayings that 
throws a brilliant light upon our present relation 
to him. "The servant knoweth not what his lord 
doeth," but we have been admitted to share his 
secret, to aid in his work. It is not that we are 
passive recipients of gifts from him, but that we 
are vital centres of his activity. The light coming 
into the world lighteneth every man in whom it 
dwells. 

It lightens us as to the realities of our own life. 
The first effect of the vision of God is the remem- 
brance of one's own impurity. When we have 



AND ASCENDED INTO HEAVEN 347 

grasped the meaning of the union of the soul with 
the Ascended Redeemer, the first effect is the over- 
whelming sense of personal unworthiness ; the sec- 
ond effect is the realisation that that unworthiness 
is not a merely personal concern, but that it is an 
obstruction to the present working of Christ. Our 
first business, we feel, is so to discipline ourselves 
that we may become less dull instruments for the 
Master's use. 

That is to say, the battle with temptation and 
sin will reveal itself much less as struggle to avoid 
breaches of rules lest we incur penalty, which is 
what it appears from the lower plane, than the 
freeing of our powers, which through sin tend to 
become weak and ineffective. Sin is like an ob- 
scure disease which saps the vitality and renders 
us unfit for work and languid in all that we do. 
How much of the spiritual languor that is charac- 
teristic of Christian communities is to be traced to 
wills which are still enslaved by sin : sins of pride, 
of sloth, of uncharity, certainly — but less obvious 
forms of sin also. The sins that we are familiar 
with are rarely the sins that are the most injurious 
spiritually. We see them and we struggle with 
them. But the spring and beginning of the spir- 
itual life, its power of attack, its blitheness in ser- 
vice, are destroyed by the dull routine of a life 
which is deficient in hopefulness and expectancy, 



34 8 MEDITATIONS ON THE APOSTLES' CREED 

which is fundamentally pessimistic. Possible action 
is negatived, action undertaken is made resultless, 
because of the hopeless spirit with which we ap- 
proach the problems of spiritual living. I am con- 
vinced that where many lives fail is just in the mat- 
ter of confidence that actions undertaken in re- 
sponse to God's call and promise will be fruitful. 
Does not this explain much of the fruitlessness of 
our Communions for example? Theoretically, we 
understand that the reception of the Holy Com- 
munion is the entrance into our soul of Incarnate 
God to deepen and strengthen the bond already ex- 
isting between him and the Christian. Any deep 
appreciation of that belief would lead, certainly, to 
frequent reception of the Blessed Sacrament, and 
it would result in that what we see at Christmas 
and Easter; churches thronged with communicants 
would be of daily occurrence. But as a matter of 
fact, that is not so, and it is not so because we let 
our theory of the Holy Communion remain a theory 
and lapse into a lower appreciation of it, as the 
fulfilling of a Christian duty, not the meeting with 
Incarnate God. What we have here at the most 
vital point of Christian experience, we have else- 
where ; we decline from the attempt to realise union 
and become centres of the spiritual activity of the 
Ascended Christ, to the routine of duty. There is 
nothing that crushes life more than to lead it under 



AND ASCENDED INTO HEAVEN 349 

the stress of duty; it is to adopt the servant's atti- 
tude, and decline that of a friend. Life is only- 
free and joyous when we have ceased to look at it 
as duty and seen it as opportunity and privilege in 
the glad response of all our nature to the impulses 
of the present Christ. 

Only under such circumstances of response can 
the spiritual powers be really free in their activity 
and become, what it is their real function to be, 
organs of vision. It is in the free exercise of the 
Christian virtues that their meaning is revealed. 
The meaning of faith and hope and love cannot be 
fully perceived in their first dim and tentative ef- 
forts : but as they are exercised they not only gain 
in strength and sureness but they reveal their ends. 
God as faithful, that he is One in whom we can 
put faith, is revealed in the life of faith. The mean- 
ing of purity, as the medium through which we see 
God, is revealed as our nature gains in purity of 
motive. The nature of the life and work of our 
Lord becomes plain to us as our lives gain in in- 
tensity and sympathy with him. Our progress in 
the exercise of the Christian virtues is just the 
growth in us of the life of the Ascended with whom 
we are ever in union. 



THE SEVENTEENTH MEDITATION 



THE 
SEVENTEENTH MEDITATION 

AND SITTETH ON THE RIGHT HAND 
OF GOD THE FATHER ALMIGHTY 

Let us listen to the words of St. Paul — 

ME raised him from the dead, and set him 
at his own right hand in the heavenly- 
places. Far above all principality, and 
power, and might, and dominion, and every name 
that is named, not only in this world, but also in 
that which is to come. And hath put all things 
under his feet, and gave him to be the head over 
all things to the church. Which is his body, the 
fulness of him that filleth all in all. 

353 



354 MEDITATIONS ON THE APOSTLES' CREED 

Let us picture — 

Our Lord throned in glory at the right hand of 
the Father. Let us worship him who in our nature 
so lived and overcame that that nature is thus ex- 
alted at God's right hand. 

We get some glimpses of that heavenly world 
from the New Testament, figurative perhaps, but 
how wonderfully suggestive. It is not the lonely 
silent world of those who believe that God is a 
mere unity, but a world full of glowing radiant 
life, a life translated for us into terms of colour 
and music, of perfect joy and perfect peace. We 
understand it best perhaps when we think of it as 
a world of beings who realise their lives in perfect 
service and perfect love, untrammelled by the limi- 
tations that flesh imposes on us. If we could but 
know one community, one little village, anywhere, 
where all loved one another, and each life went out 
to each in eager service, would not that be like 
heaven? If we could know a single household 
where love reigned undisturbed by any irritation, 
any harsh judgment, any misinterpretation — could 
we not through that understand heaven? Now at 
the right hand of God our Lord is enthroned in 
our nature high above all created being, and all 
are bound to him in perfect peace and perfect love 
and all obey him with perfect readiness of service. 



AND SITTETH ON THE RIGHT HAND OF GOD 355 

Consider, first — 

That at the right hand of God our Lord is not 
unmindful of us; rather with his enthronement as 
king of the new kingdom, the church, his work 
for us enters a new stage. By his Incarnation and 
Atonement he had won the right to build a human 
kingdom, and from henceforth at the right hand of 
the Father he is creating it. We shall only under- 
stand the nature of his work if we understand 
aright what that kingdom, that church, is. It is 
his body, the fulness of him that filleth all in all. 
One tries in vain to picture all that such a phrase 
as that may mean; but out of its meaning one 
gathers this impression : an impression of our Lord 
going out and laying hold upon human Jives and 
uniting himself to them and bringing them into 
union with himself, thus extending himself, thus 
incarnating himself, he gradually creates, builds 
up, this body which is his fulness, the comple- 
tion of his incarnate life. The extension of our 
Lord's incarnate life is the work of the mediatorial 
kingdom. Here, in this world, is being built up 
his Mystical Body. Whenever any soul is regener- 
ated it enters upon its life of union with its Lord, 
which is its true life. Whenever any fallen soul 
receives remission of its sins it is restored to its 
true life in Christ. The success of the church is 



35^ MEDITATIONS ON THE APOSTLES' CREED 

its success in regenerating and renewing souls. 
The true progress of humanity is its inclusion in 
the body of Christ, that, filled with the life of the 
body, each one by himself may manifest that life 
unto the world, and show the meaning of his Risen 
Master. 

Consider, second — 

That you have been regenerated and made one 
with Christ and through that oneness are in pos- 
session of the powers of that kingdom which is his 
Body; are a part (if one may put it so) of the ful- 
ness of him who filleth all in all. This puts the 
life of the Christian on a divine and heavenly plane. 
The one thing that in the history of the church has 
been above all disastrous has been the failure of 
Christians to face squarely what being a Christian 
means. Let us be sure that we put away from us 
all thought of the Christian religion as a distant 
following of an example which is so perfect that 
we can hardly hope to attain to the imitation of 
some of its lesser activities, and understand that 
we are Christians because we are personally united 
to Jesus Christ, and that his life manifests itself 
through us in holiness of living. Our relation to 
our Lord now enthroned at the right hand of the 
Father is not that of disciples engaged in a distant 
contemplation of their Master, but that of members 



AND SITTETH ON THE RIGHT HAND OF GOD 357 

of the Body filled with the one life of the Body 
which is the life of its Royal Head. It is our pres- 
ent concern, when we question ourselves as to our 
religion, to ask ourselves of its reality and its vital- 
ity : Whether this is our faith, our certainty, our 
experience, that we are one with Christ our Lord. 
The union is there, if we are really Christ's disci- 
ples; but it is so great a fact that we may never 
have seen it. Not only are there things so small 
that we cannot see them, but things too great to- 
be seen except partially and fragmentarily. As 
wholes, they have to be constructed from our many 
partial experiences of them. What the ocean means 
to us in its grandeur, its infinite diversity, is the 
resultant of a series of experiences which we now 
imaginatively grasp in a single conception. And 
even so, we feel that the whole fact has not been 
made ours ; but that each new day upon its shining 
surface, each new hour by its surf-smitten shore, 
adds experiences that enter into and broaden our 
meaning when the mood of meditation synthesises 
for us our whole experience. So the reality of our 
relation to our Blessed Lord is experienced by us 
in unnumbered ways : in the intimacy of our pray- 
ers, in the flashes of love that light up our times of 
meditation and recollection, in the sense of security 
that we have when we consciously place our lives 
in his hands, in the consolation that comes to us 



35 8 MEDITATIONS ON THE APOSTLES' CREED 

whenever we bring our pain and sorrow and lay 
it at his feet, in the feeling of ardent strength, the 
consciousness of ability to go out and meet the 
problems of life, in all those partial and varied 
"graces," as we call them, which we instinctively 
relate to him. We have no doubt that all these are 
spiritual experiences and come from him. What 
we so often miss is the fact that these are not sep- 
arate "graces," but that they are partial experiences 
of the underlying fact of our union with our Lord, 
that they are all manifestations, not of a distant 
power, but of his indwelling presence. 

Let us, then, pray — 

That we may see our Lord personally present in 
all the facts of our religious experience. That we 
may learn to recognise him in all our activity. That 
we may think less of his power and more of his 
presence. 

Almighty and merciful God, unto whose ever- 
lasting blessedness we ascend, not by the frailty of 
the flesh, but by the activity of the soul; make us 
ever, by thy inspiration, to seek after the courts of 
the heavenly city, and, by thy mercy, confidently to 
enter therein ; through Jesus Christ, our Lord. 



The Gospels end with the Ascension of our Lord. 
As the cloud receives him and he vanishes out of 



AND SITTETH ON THE RIGHT HAND OF GOD 359 

our sight, we close the volume with the feeling that 
we have followed the life of Jesus of Nazareth to 
its end. Once more, at the end of time, he shall 
appear to judge the world in righteousness; but in 
the meantime we have our life here to live in the 
faith of him. What our Bible has to tell us when 
we open it again at the Acts of the Apostles, is the 
history of the Church which is his Body and repre- 
sentative now. We follow the word of the angel, 
and stand no longer gazing up into heaven, but 
return to Jerusalem and the practical life of Chris- 
tianity. What lies beyond the gate that was mo- 
mentarily lifted to allow the King of Glory to come 
in and then dropped again, we little know. 

And yet if we were to take up our Bibles and 
read them with the thought of learning as much as 
they tell us of the heavenly life of the Ascended 
Jesus, we should probably be surprised to find how 
much we actually are told about that life. The life 
of the Church is not conceived in the New Testa- 
ment as it is conceived in the latest Church histor- 
ies, elaborated with infinite pains by the severe 
application of the scientific method to the facts of 
primitive Christianity ; rather, it is conceived as the 
externalisation of the constant and ever-present 
action of One enthroned in our nature at the Right 
Hand of the Father; One who, through the action 
of the Holy Spirit whom he has sent forth, is ex- 



360 MEDITATIONS ON THE APOSTLES' CREED 

tending his Incarnate life by the ingathering of 
human souls. The things that arrest the attention 
of the scientific historian, the evolution and date of 
documents, the distribution and mode of exercise 
of authority, present such complicated problems for 
his solution just because they were not at all the 
centre of interest to the New Testament writers. 
You may write the history of any human society 
from many points of view; but after it has been 
written from one point of view it will inevitably be 
difficult to write it from another on the basis of the 
first history. The history of a British colony, 
written in terms of imperial experience will not 
lend itself very well to a reconstruction of the life 
of the colony in terms of social experience. So it 
is difficult to disentangle the actual history of the 
Christian Church, precisely because the writers of 
the primitive Christian documents were not inter- 
ested about the current events of the expansion of 
Christianity, but viewed it altogether as the work 
of the Spirit in the edification of the Body of Christ. 
They were continually conscious of the operation 
of the Ascended Jesus who was at once at the Right 
Hand of the Father and in the midst of the Chris- 
tian assembly when two or three were gathered. 
The life of the Body for them was not expressed 
in the institutions which necessarily shaped them- 
selves as time went on ; its real life was that which 



AND SITTETH ON THE RIGHT HAND OF GOD 36 1 

was hid with Christ in God. Their centre of inter- 
est was in the renewal and growth of the new man 
in Christ Jesus. 

Studied from the point of view of the writers, 
the documents of the early Church have much to 
say of the present life and action of the Incarnate 
and Ascended Son of God. Briefly, for we have 
not time to enter into the details of the Ascended 
Life, he is the King of the Mediatorial Kingdom, 
he is our Lord and Ruler; and — the point that I 
want to make just now — the object of his rule is 
human freedom, to free men from the power of 
sin, to confer upon them the glorious liberty of the 
Children of God. 

The primary defect, from the religious point of 
view, of the natural man, is that he is not free. His 
life and conduct is the resultant of many forces. 
His heredity has moulded him into a certain shape, 
transmitting to him the characters of remote ances- 
tors; he is the creature of the past, both in body 
and mind. His environment has subjected him to 
the action of forces which have so influenced him 
that when he comes to years of discretion and is 
called upon to make choice in life,, he finds that he 
has already acquired habits which largely direct 
and control his choice. More than all, he is pos- 
sessed of a will which is under the bondage of sin. 
In every moment of his living his past is present 



362 MEDITATIONS ON THE APOSTLES' CREED 

and active, so that in the presence of new and ad- 
mired ideals he yet finds that he cannot do the 
thing that he would, and cries out in his agony, in 
his exceeding need : — "Who shall save me from this 
body of death?" 

And then the answer comes, the answer of ex- 
perience : — "Throught Jesus Christ our Lord." 
From him, living, risen, ascended, comes freedom. 

It turns out, when we examine the documents of 
our religion, that the thing that man is ever pur- 
suing under the name of freedom, is not freedom 
at all. Man conceives freedom as the ability to do 
what he wants to do and thereby gets into difficul- 
ties with the metaphysician, and psychologist, and 
even the physicist, on the question of free will. But 
the question as it presents itself to the average man, 
"Can one do what one wants to do?" is of little 
importance. The real question is, "What can one 
want to do?" Is the man free to want, and so to 
attain, a certain kind of life? For the essence of 
Christian freedom is ability to attain the ideal ends 
set before us by Christ. Am I in that sense, free? 

And certainly we must say that "by nature" we 
are not so free. The Christian ideal for us is that 
we shall become the sons of God, and through the 
participation in the Incarnation of the Eternal Son 
become partakers of the Divine nature. We are 
called into union with God so that the end of our 



AND SITTETH ON THE RIGHT HAND OF GOD 363 

life is to be divinised. Freedom, to the Christian, 
means freedom to attain that life of union, and 
grow up in Christ to its ultimate and presently in- 
conceivable results. Such freedom as that is the 
gift of God. The inclination towards it is the out- 
come of the divine election in consequence of which, 
through the operation of the Holy Spirit, the 
Father draws us. That operation is universal in 
as much as the Father willeth all men to be saved ; 
but there is no universal response even to such a 
wonderful offer as that of freedom. 

The Incarnation of the Son of God, then, revealed 
the purpose of man's creation, and set plainly be- 
fore him for the first time the wonder of his possible 
destiny. The present action of the Incarnate Son 
throned at the Right Hand of the Father communi- 
cates the sustaining power which enables us to 
grow up in him and thus attain the fulness of his 
promise. We are made free by our incorporation 
in the Son and the action of the Holy Spirit upon 
us. But though this freedom is ours from the time 
of our regeneration we do not realise the fruits of 
it without struggle. The gift of freedom is not a 
gift of sinlessness or of immunity from temptation. 
We are not given the completeness of the redeemed 
life, but the power to attain it. The natural man 
acts in response to the pressure of life, with little 
choice, following the line of the least resistance. 



364 MEDITATIONS ON THE APOSTLES* CREED 

The spiritual man enters a period of struggle where 
he has consciously to choose between the service of 
God and the denial of that service — between the 
ideals of the Christian life and social ideals, which 
he finds in vogue in his environment. This involves 
a period of struggle, a struggle that is not com- 
pletely emerged from so long as life lasts, but which 
through the exercise of his freedom may result in 
the definite choice of God and in the realisation of 
himself as the son of God. 

One of the great dangers that beset the Chris- 
tian is lest we shall conceive of the ideal of the 
Christian life in a narrow and partial way. Men 
are continually conceiving of Christianity as con- 
cerning parts or sections of life. This results in 
blocking life out in spheres of action labelled 
"religious" and "secular," and ends with the refer- 
ence of only a part of the life to God. God is con- 
ceived as being concerned with "religion" while 
the part of life that is not docketed "religious" is 
"secular" and may be conducted in accordance with 
secular conventions. This, at any rate seems to be 
the only explanation of a good deal of the conduct 
of business. Men whose religion would seem to 
be quite sincere, if not very intelligent, take part in 
business transactions which are very difficult to 
square with the Ten Commandments, to say noth- 
ing of the Gospel teaching. They appear in their 



AND SITTETH ON THE RIGHT HAND OF GOD 365 

places in church on Sunday after a week spent in 
transactions that one finds it difficult to differentiate 
from pure gambling, or after pushing their busi- 
ness by advertisements that one cannot call by any 
milder name than lies, quite as though their week- 
day actions had been normal from the Christian 
standpoint. It is notorious that the social life of 
America is filled with practices that are indefensible 
from the ground of Christian morals. One need 
only instance the widespread gambling and the utter 
disregard of the obligations of the Lord's Day ; yet 
the men and women who participate in such prac- 
tices would be insulted if one were to intimate that 
they were not good Christians. It is difficult to 
understand what they mean by Christianity, till one 
discovers that there is somewhere a small section 
of life that they regard as religious. In some ob- 
scure cupboard there is a little set of rules, the 
chief of which seems to be having a pew in some 
church and receiving the Holy Communion once or 
twice a year. It is a long way from a life that is 
hid with Christ in God, and whose conversation is 
in heaven, to a life that expresses its relation to the 
Ascended King in a few petty observances, or ad- 
herence to a few moral maxims, which very likely 
are not Christian at all. The trouble is that men 
who conceive Christianity as a set of more or less 
burdensome oppressions, will never progress to a 



366 MEDITATIONS ON THE APOSTLES' CREED 

higher stage. In this attitude of mind humanity is 
like horse and mule which must be held by bit and 
bridle because there is no other way of getting him 
on. The Christian life is experience, and ought 
early to pass beyond the childish stage of observ- 
ance to the free life of the child of God — a life 
which only feels the pressure of law when it falls 
below its own conception of living. That is the 
point St. Paul makes over and over again. All that 
difficult and uninteresting argument of his (so men 
find it) about the law, is perfectly intelligible and 
helpful if we remember that what he is protesting 
against is the attempt to formulate life as a set of 
rules — protesting that Christianity is not this, and 
loses its true character when so conceived. If one 
is a Christian one is in another sphere, one is be- 
yond interest in things with which rules deal — Law 
is made for the unrighteous. 

Life is all religious, or it is all secular. Secular 
things do not transform life to secularity, and re- 
lease it when it ceases to touch them, so that by 
another set of occupations it becomes religious. 
The man himself, by virtue of the whole direction 
of his life, is first of all religious or secular, and 
then imparts his own character to his occupations. 
He eliminates, necessarily, that whicK is anti- 
Christian ; but he fills with his own spirit and pur- 
pose and raises to the level of Christian service all 



AND SITTETH ON THE RIGHT HAND OF GOD 367 

that he finds it possible for a Christian to do. His 
work, whatever it is, becomes the medium of his 
self-expression; his work does not dominate him 
and drag him down to the level of its materiality, 
but he dominates it and raises it to the height of 
his own spirituality. If there is anything that can- 
not be done in a Christian way, it ought not to be 
done by a Christian man. Our Lord taught once 
for all that a man is not defiled by the things he 
touches and handles, but that he can impart his 
own inner uncleanness to the most useful and inno- 
cent things. 

But, it is objected, such a conception of life leads 
to mere lawlessness; it is impossible to live with- 
out rules; one must know what one's obligations 
are, what is to be done and what avoided. But the 
very point is that we can never know in any com- 
plete sense what is to be done and what avoided 
by a system of rules. If we learn it at all we must 
learn it in some other way. The attempt to cover 
life by rule simply ends in the creation of a system 
of ever increasing elaboration till you find all sim- 
plicity and spontaneity of life stifled in the end- 
lessly increasing meshes of some Lilliputian web. 
There is a certain class of society which believes 
that manners can be created by the study of books 
of etiquette, and that you may learn how to foster 
love from a complete letter writer. The same sort 



368 MEDITATIONS ON THE APOSTLES' CREED 

of mind would imagine that one could live a spir- 
itual life by daily continuance in "pious practices." 
There are books for these, too. But if we love one 
another we find means of expressing our love with- 
out recourse to the ladies who preside over the 
appropriate columns in the newspaper. And if we 
love God we shall find the love discovering appro- 
priate means of expression in life. If we love God 
so that our lives go out in devoted service to him, 
we shall find that this love creates the appropriate 
form of services and furnishes its own tests. Our 
Lord's rule, "Thou shalt love the Lord thy God 
and thy neighbour as thyself, actually covers life 
with its broad sweep; in the light of it we may 
live, but the attempt to schematise it before hand 
and deduce all the instances that may fall under it, 
lands one in an unaimiable Phariseeism. Take but 
the one case that I mentioned above, the observance 
of Sunday; the attempt to say what can be done 
and cannot be done on Sunday leads us in the ab- 
surdities of a Sabbath day journey; leaves us ask- 
ing endless questions about work and amusement, 
till we sink into a merely pettifogging state of 
mind — the state of mind of a conscienceless lawyer 
trying to invent a way to commit a crime without 
coming into contact with a statute. But what we 
are dealing with is not a statute within the letter 
of which we must, at all costs, remain, but with a 



AND SITTETH ON THE RIGHT HAND OF GOD 369 

loving Father who has indicated a method of spir- 
itual growth to his child. Religiously (not so- 
cially) considered, if you do not want to express 
anything through the observance of command- 
ments, I do not see that it makes any difference 
whether you do or do not observe them. The point 
of this is that they afford means of spiritual ex- 
pression, and if you cannot find that, it would not 
appear of much use to chaffer as to the allowability 
of motoring or tennis. And if the Lord's Day is 
an opportunity that you have found, the petty 
weighings of pros and cons in relation to some 
form of work or amusement will not occur. 

Our Lord's ideal of life for us is expressed in 
the principles which underlie his teaching and are 
exemplified in his life. This teaching as it comes 
to us in the Gospel appeals to men as being very 
difficult of appropriation. That is due for one 
thing to the fact that I have been insisting upon, 
that it is not confined to rules of evident applica- 
tion and that therefore they cannot be obeyed, but 
only lived. Remember the Sabbath day to keep it 
holy, looks easy and definite, whatever may be the 
actual facts about it. But that the Sabbath is made 
for man, not man for the Sabbath, seems hopelessly 
vague as a principle of life. Yet it is the latter that 
is vitally useful as pointing the way of spiritual 
opportunity. Thou shalt not kill or steal, is, no 



37° MEDITATIONS ON THE APOSTLES' CREED 

doubt, plain and definite, but also barren in the 
realm of the Spirit; while, thou shalt love thy 
neighbour as thyself, is unendingly fruitful. After 
he had kept the commandments from his youth up, 
the rich young ruler was still asking what he should 
do to inherit eternal life, so little that was vital had 
they taught him. If his experience had been that 
he had loved the Lord his God with all his heart 
and all his mind and all his strength, and his neigh- 
bour as himself, he might have met our Lord's 
test differently. To live by Christian principles 
means to have found in them the way of express- 
ing the relation that is between your soul and God. 
They exist, not because they are arbitrarily im- 
posed, but because they are the most appropriate 
form for the expression of our sonship, because 
the living of the life of union with the Ascended 
Christ naturally falls in to these forms. 

It is, no doubt, as men complain, difficult to live 
the Sermon on the Mount. But its difficulty is not 
where it is assumed to be. It is difficult as one 
more set of rules — to insist perhaps overmuch on 
that point. It is difficult when approached from 
the outside. But there is no command to be hum- 
ble or peaceful or merciful. There is simply the 
statement that such states of soul are blessed. They 
do not tell us how to acquire a certain character; 
they merely tell us that a character of that kind is 



AND SITTETH ON THE RIGHT HAND OF GOD 37 1 

blessed of God — blessed of him because it is the 
reproduction of the Incarnate life of his Son. We, 
by our awkwardness, impose a difficulty upon it. 
We try to acquire one or another of its virtues 
piecemeal ; we try to impose the patch of humility 
upon the old garment of our unchanged life. The 
attempt produces an appearance of artifice which 
you are no more likely to mistake for a Christian 
virtue than you are the carefully painted face of a. 
woman for the work of nature. If you see grapes 
on thistles you know they did not grow there. If 
you went to hear the overture to the Meistersinger 
and nothing was played but the trombone parts 
you would not come away filled with joy. So we 
suspect humility if it is not accompanied by peace- 
fulness and mercy and the rest. But when once 
one has started at the beginning, and is humbly 
trying to love God and live by the life of Christ, 
then the Beatitudes turn out to be the natural ex- 
pression of that life. I do not mean that in all 
stages of Christian development we shall find self- 
expression in those terms easy. But we shall find 
that the Christian life naturally expresses itself 
through them so far as it has gone. It will pro- 
ceed on those lines and not on other lines ; in all 
stages we shall find there what we should expect — 
the perfect expression of what we imperfectly are. 



_37 2 MEDITATIONS ON THE APOSTLES' CREED 

"We grow up, but we grow up in accordance with a 
certain pattern — a pattern shown us on a Mount. 

Men to-day are becoming intensely interested in 
the moral failure of modern society, and well they 
may be. But in their efforts to better things they 
have gone hopelessly wrong. They are busy draw- 
ing up new morals, that is, new sets of rules, 
founded on science or social experience or what 
not. They expect to succeed in reforming society 
by the exertion of some sort of educational pres- 
sure on life, when the real trouble is with the qual- 
ity of the life itself. I read in the newspaper this 
morning an account of an enthusiastic gentleman 
who is preparing to cure the tramp evil by showing 
children moving pictures of tramps. It seems not 
to have occurred to him that the only people who 
will care very much about avoiding vice are, not 
the people who see its hideousness, but the people 
who have gotten in some way to love virtue. It 
seems not to occur to the makers of new rules that 
their real difficulty will not be in drawing up 
admirable codes, but in getting anybody to love 
them. I cannot imagine falling in love with a 
medical maxim about purity. I cannot even imag- 
ine falling in love with a Christian maxim about 
humility — in fact few people do — they mostly hate 
such maxims. But I can imagine falling in love 
with the Glory of God in the Face of Jesus Christ 



AND SITTETH ON THE RIGHT HAND OF GOD 373 

and ardently desiring so to give myself to him that 
his life shall be manifest in my body as purity and 
humility and charity. And this was the method of 
appeal of the first followers of our Lord, was it 
not? The first disciples did not set about obeying: 
him; they set about loving him; and their conduct 
is the result of possessing and being possessed by 
his mind ; being possessed by that, their lives were 
transformed to be like his life. 

And being so possessed they did not will any- 
thing other than he willed; they had achieved the 
only perfect freedom — the freedom to be con- 
formed to the life of God's Son and attain the end 
for which they were created. Their lives could 
not expand in the same degree as his human life — 
checks and hindrances there might still be — but 
their faces were set toward the city and they were 
certain with him to attain. They did not see pain 
and sorrow and suffering abolished for them, any 
more than we do; but they saw Jesus their Head 
made perfect through the sufferings of the way 
they were following, crowned and exalted to the 
Right Hand of God; and they felt that in union 
with him they were sure of the same triumph. It 
is well to note the certainty that the triumph of 
Jesus inspired in his followers, how negligible a 
thing their present experience of pain seems to 
them in comparison with their certain share in his 



374 MEDITATIONS ON THE APOSTLES CREED 

triumph. One of the most disturbing things about 
average Christianity is the constant tendency to 
make its own small experience a standard of judg- 
ment upon life, rather than the experience of its 
Ascended Head. Our sufferings bring into our 
lives a tone of discouragement, of doubt of the actu- 
ality of the rule of our Lord in the world. Every 
pain and grief and disaster seems to men to throw 
doubt on either the goodness of the existence of 
God. But turn to an earlier point of view. We 
read in the Acts of the Martyrs, not once or twice, 
this note of time : These things happened in such 
a year, "in the reign of Christ." Here were men 
setting down the cruel fate of their fellow Chris- 
tians, men and women and children whom they 
had known and loved and whose death by fire or 
sword or wild beasts they had just witnessed. They 
are recounting the death by torture of one whose 
only offence was that he was a worshipper of 
Christ. And they show no mark of surprise that 
this should happen "in the reign of Christ." What 
does it mean but that Christ was also reigning in 
them ? That they were so conscious of their union 
with him that it was altogether natural to them 
that they should re-enact his experience? But the 
experience cast no shadow of doubt upon his reign. 
Surely, this is normal to the Christian life — that 
it is certain first of all, of being Christ-possessed, 



AND SITTETH ON THE RIGHT HAND OF GOD 375 

of seeking its true end in permitting the Christ ex- 
perience to be renewed in it. Jesus reigns. And he 
reigns not over the Christian, but in him. Our 
lives are knit closer and closer to him, and as he 
masters them more and more, so they become freer 
and freer. Temptation ceases to appeal; sin loses 
its attractive power; the call of the world sounds 
fainter and fainter; and finally the child of God 
emerges the master of life, free forever to grow 
into the full likeness of his Father, 



THE EIGHTEENTH MEDITATION 



THE EIGHTEENTH MEDITATION 

FROM THENCE HE SHALL COME TO 
JUDGE THE QUICK AND THE DEAD 

Listen to the words of the Scriptures — 



3 



EHOLD, he cometh with clouds, and every 
eye shall see him. 



Let us try to picture — 

The coming of our Lord to judgment. The ele- 
ments of the scene are given us in Holy Scripture. 
The essential thing is that our Lord will be revealed 
to us — that Lord whom we have continually thought 
of, and who has been the life of all our spiritual 
experience. This is he to whom we have addressed 
our prayers; he whom we have called on for help 
in all our necessities. The thought of his love and 

379 



380 MEDITATIONS ON THE APOSTLES' CREED 

his mercy has encouraged us when we have been 
deeply conscious of our own failure. In moments 
of despair, when we have been tempted to abandon 
all further effort, it has been the thought of his 
promise not to cast off any that come to him that 
has made it possible for us to go on. This is he 
who has stood by us in our sorrows ; he it is with 
whom we have had moments of intimate commu- 
nion, wherein our souls have heard his voice and 
been conscious of his guidance. This is he whom 
we have received in our communions, when we 
seemed taken up into his life and held close in his 
arms. This is he, Jesus, the Saviour ! There have 
perhaps been moments when we looked forward to 
the judgment as a dreadful thing; but when it 
comes, it will come as the revelation of a friend : it 
is one whom we have long and intimately known 
that we shall meet face to face. Why should we 
picture to ourselves the terrors of the judgment? 
Why not rather picture it as the joy that fills the 
souls of those who have at length attained the end 
for which they have been striving ? Why not think 
of eager welcome, with the joyous greeting, "Well 
done"? Is it that we are conscious of the imper- 
fection of our work? Imperfection there doubtless 
is and will be ; but for the Christian who has tried 
to make his life a life of manifestation and service, 
it is not the imperfection that will count, but the 



TO JUDGE THE QUICK AND THE DEAD 38 1 

fidelity to vocation. There is too much of fear in 
our thought of our Lord. Let us picture the judg- 
ment as the realisation of all that we have wished 
for and tried to be. 

Consider, first — 

That we are all the time preparing for the judg- 
ment; that is, preparing to meet our Lord face to 
face in his manifested glory. We are consciously 
preparing; or, unconsciously, life is preparing us. 
If we are consciously preparing it is through the 
cultivation of the friendship of Jesus. We are 
growing in likeness to him ; growing to think his 
thoughts and to look out upon life with his eyes. 
The inner secret of friendship is sympathy ; and if 
we are growing into his friendship, we are deepen- 
ing our sympathy with him, and growing to know 
even as we are known. We read our Gospels and 
find within us a ready understanding of the words 
of Jesus, an eager response to his will. Our lives 
shape themselves more and more in harmony with 
his, and we find that our self-expression is in terms 
of his teaching. This is that forming of Christ in 
us of which St. Paul speaks. This is that process 
of which St. John tells, of which the outcome is 
that "we shall be like him." Consider that the 
judgment is the unveiling of the results of this 
process, the bringing to light of the achieved like- 



382 MEDITATIONS ON THE APOSTLES' CREED 

ness — or unlikeness. If we are like him, the thought 
of judgment is full of joy because it is the time of 
the discovery of the likeness : and having waked 
up after his likeness we shall be satisfied with it. 

Consider, second — 

Whether your life bears the marks of this con- 
formity to the life of your Redeemer. The test is 
whether you are being attracted to that life as that 
which expresses best the ardent desires of your soul. 
We are revealed through our admirations ; we are 
made known by the direction of our movement. 
Have you so sincere an admiration of the Christ- 
life that your life moves towards it, deserting all 
other ideals? Or is your admiration of that life 
just a mental attitude adopted under the influence 
of the expressed thought of Christendom, but con- 
taining no original contribution from yourself? 
The judgment will be the unveiling of your real 
relation to our Blessed Lord. It will be the final 
testing of the superstructure that you have been 
erecting upon the foundation of your Christian pro- 
fession — whether "gold, silver, precious stones, 
wood, hay, stubble." Consider the judgment as the 
testing of your life's labour and achievement — that 
accomplishment of which, perhaps, you are to-day 
rather proud. Think of the horror of seeing all that 
consumed in the fire of the judgment, judged unfit 



TO JUDGE THE QUICK AND THE DEAD 383 

for the Master's use. Consider it, burning away 
and leaving your life without fruit. But what will 
be the joy of seeing the gleam of the gold and the 
flash of the jewels as they emerge from the fire, 
uninjured! Imagine the gladness of the welcome: 
"Come ye blessed of my Father, inherit the king- 
dom prepared for you from the foundation of the 
world." 

Let us, then, pray — 

To prepare ourselves for the return of our Lord, 
as servants who watch. Watch therefore, for ye 
know not the hour. Pray for such love of our Lord 
as shall lead us out eagerly to welcome him at his 
coming. 

Make us, we beseech thee, O Lord our God, 
watchful and heedful in awaiting the coming of thy 
Son Christ, our Lord ; that when he shall come and 
knock, he may find us not sleeping in sins, but 
awake, and rejoicing in his praises; through the 
same Jesus Christ our Lord. 

O Christ our God, who wilt come to judge the 
world in the Manhood which thou hast assumed, 
we pray thee to sanctify us wholly, that in the day 
of thy coming our whole spirit, soul and body may 
so revive to a fresh life in thee, that we may live 
and reign with thee forever. 



384 MEDITATIONS ON THE APOSTLES* CREED 

The thought of judgment, whether of the world 
at the consummation of this age, or of the individ- 
ual soul at death, has exercised ceaseless fascina- 
tion upon the mind of man; he has exhausted all 
the resources of his artistic nature in the effort to 
present his thought of it. It has been presented as 
the piteous pleading of naked souls shivering in 
their loneliness, their helplessness, their conscious- 
ness of guilt, before the stern tribunal of an offended 
God. It has been depicted with an eye to the dra- 
matic contrast between the joy of the saved and 
the despair of the lost — the saved are welcomed by 
rejoicing angels to the glories of heaven, the lost 
dragged by exultant demons to the torture of hell. 
All that the brush of the painter, the pen of the 
poet, the eloquence of the orator, can do has been 
done to impress us with the terror of the judgment. 
And men have shuddered before the painted walls, 
they have felt their very souls freeze as they turned 
the pages of the poets, they have writhed in agony 
under the eloquence of the orators, and yet, I think, 
there has been perceptible all along the feeling that 
such presentations of the judgment were inadequate 
to the fact; not in that the powers of man are too 
feeble to grasp such a fact in its entirety, but in 
that the very essence of the judgment has been mis- 
conceived. 

It is one of the very hopeful things about human 



TO JUDGE THE QUICK AND THE DEAD 385 

nature as it has been influenced by the Gospel, that 
as we stand before the artistic conception of the 
judgment, we are moved to sympathy for the lost. 
We do not ask very much about the angels that lead 
saved souls along the lily-bordered paths of Para- 
dise ; but our hearts are filled with tears as the 
desolate souls are led away to their torture. We 
feel, I think, that the essential fact of the judgment 
escapes us under such symbolism, and that if it is 
ever to be intelligible, or, indeed, credible to us, the 
symbols must be changed. All the laughter of de- 
mons, all the tortures of the lost, all the triumph 
over human disaster and failure, must pass from 
the picture before we can at all understand it as 
expressing the relation of God to a lost soul. Each 
age will, no doubt, create its own symbolic presenta- 
tion of the essential fact, or its own interpretation 
of the Gospel imagery, but as man spiritually ad- 
vances he finds that the symbol of another age is in- 
adequate to the expression of his own thought and 
experience. It is only truth that is eternal, and we 
must beware of confounding truth with its symbolic 
expression. 

One of the primary mistakes, one feels, in much 
that one finds expressed about the judgment, is the 
admission of a certain arbitrary element to it. Our 
experience of human administration of justice in- 
evitably contains this element. Its data are imper- 



386 MEDITATIONS ON THE APOSTLES' CREED 

feet, its premises are uncertain, its judgments may 
be set aside for reasons which have nothing to do 
with the guilt or innocence of the criminal. We see 
the criminal escape the penalty of his crime through 
the mere favour of governing powers. Mercy 
shows itself to us as pity refusing to impose penalty. 
And we carry this conception over to the divine 
administration of the world. We conceive the fate 
of the world as the enforcement of a penalty that 
mercy might in any case decline to enforce. Where- 
as, that is not and cannot be the method of the 
divine justice. God does not inflict punishment 
upon the sinner. It is not true that my sin may be 
pardoned if God, so to say, can be found in the 
mood of mercy. 

Human justice looks at the act committed and 
pays small attention to the consciousness of the 
offender — that is outside the reach of its knowledge ; 
but in the divine justice the act is relatively unim- 
portant, the mind of the actor is all important. The 
essence of the divine judgment is that it displays 
what a man is ; it imposes nothing. It is not a blind 
inflictor of penalty for deeds done, but the mani- 
festation of a state of soul in relation to God. 

The article of the Creed with which we are con- 
cerned has to do with the final judgment; that judg- 
ment which takes place at the end of the Media- 
torial Kingdom of our Lord, when he shall have 



TO JUDGE THE QUICK AND THE DEAD 387 

subdued all things and delivered them to the Father. 
But we must remember that there is another judg- 
ment which more immediately concerns us — the par- 
ticular judgment, which takes place at death. The 
general judgment is the display of the results of our 
Lord's Incarnate work, and not the decision of the 
fate of souls which have, till then, waited in sus- 
pense. The particular judgment is the display of 
the results of one's own individual life, in relation ta 
the opportunities given by God. I should suppose 
that we might say of this judgment that it is the 
revelation of a man to himself; the reaping of the 
harvest that he has sown. I cannot conceive that 
anyone should dissent from that judgment, because 
it is not the imposition of penalty, but the recogni- 
tion of facts as they are. I cannot conceive the 
possibility of a reversal of that judgment ; one can 
appeal from a penalty, a punishment imposed, but 
one cannot appeal from a state of soul, from a spir- 
itual nature that we have chosen to make what it 
now actually is. The state of the soul at any time 
must depend upon its capacity. Heaven can only 
be revealed to a soul that has capacity to receive it. 
From time to time this perception of the spiritual 
inequalities of the human lot and the obvious inca- 
pacity of many for spiritual knowledge and enjoy- 
ment has led to the development of theories of a 
future probation for those who seem to us to have 



388 MEDITATIONS ON THE APOSTLES' CREED 

failed here ; an extension, in other words, of oppor- 
tunity for choice which seems to have been inade- 
quately offered in this life. It is assumed that if 
probation is sufficiently extended all men will ulti- 
mately make choice of God. One can only say that 
there is nothing in the Christian Religion to encour- 
age such a notion, nor do I know of anything in the 
nature of the case that seems to make it needful. 
It rests on the assumption that the probation offered 
men here is inadequate. But inadequate for what? 
It is true that the opportunities of this life, as far 
as we can judge of them, are inadequate in many 
cases to enable souls to develop into a life of sanc- 
tity — to grow into the purity which is the medium 
of the vision of God. If it is needful that all men 
in this life shall acquire that capacity in order to 
see God at any time, then we might infer that the 
divine justice implied a second probation, or an 
extension of the present. But Catholic Christianity 
has never so conceived the case. Catholic Chris- 
tianity has ever taught that a lost soul is one that, 
of full knowledge and determinate will, has rejected 
God in whatsoever form and under whatsoever con- 
ditions he has presented himself to it. It has not 
thought of failure to find God as being fatal, but of 
rejection of him when found. The theology of 
Catholic Christianity leaves ample room for the 
growth of ignorant and immature souls. It is only 



TO JUDGE THE QUICK AND THE DEAD 389 

when that theology is rejected that the pressure of 
the facts of human life seems to compel the thought 
of some further opportunity. But renewed oppor- 
tunity can only mean opportunity for one or two 
things : — Either opportunity for God to gain more 
complete knowledge of the soul, which can hardly 
be what is meant ; or opportunity for the soul to gain 
more complete knowledge of God. This is no 
doubt what is meant. But such opportunity is, by 
Catholic teaching, afforded by the Middle State in 
the case of all who are imperfect, but still in pos- 
session of the necessary spiritual capacity ; and in 
the case of those who have rejected God and de- 
stroyed their spiritual capacity, it would be fruitless. 
We may reasonably hope that the number of those 
will be small ; but the Christian revelation is clear 
that there will be some. For these a second proba- 
tion would be useless ; for others, unnecessary. 

Let us try to look at the particular judgment, less 
as a matter of theological statement, and more as an 
intimate and personal thing. I suppose most per- 
sons decline to think of it at all, or think of it only 
with dread. This can only rest, so far as it is 
rational, and not merely emotional, on a feeling of 
the uncertainty of what will happen. Now the un- 
expected is precisely the element that, as Christians, 
we ought to be able to elminate. There is surely 
no need that any Christians should be so ignorant 



39° MEDITATIONS ON THE APOSTLES' CREED 

-of their religion and of their own conduct as not to 
know whether they are saved or no. The Christian 
certainly knows what his religion requires of him. 
As certainly he knows of his manifold imperfections. 
He must also know whether his repentance is sin- 
cere and his attempt to serve our Lord is whole- 
hearted. If he knows these things, he knows that 
he is saved, and that death will not bring him the 
surprise of final rejection from the presence of God. 
But while so much would seem to be plain, surely 
no Christian can be satisfied with so much. So 
much, indeed, implies the existence of much more. 
It implies that we have conceived life in terms of 
the life of our Lord. It implies, not the shrinking 
from the thought of death and all that it will intro- 
duce us to, but a certain detachment from this life, 
and a readiness, even eagerness, for the future. It 
is true that our proper fulfilling of the duties of 
this life requires a feeling of their worth and per- 
manence. We shall not be the better Christians for 
declining them or underrating them. But we shall 
be the better Christians if we estimate them from 
the point of view of their effect upon us as the chil- 
dren of God, whose real life must be completed 
elsewhere. The vividness with which the saint de- 
sires to depart and be with Christ is not to be ex- 
pected of the still immature Christian; but neither 
is it to be expected of him that he will so cling to 



TO JUDGE THE QUICK AND THE DEAD 39I 

this world that death will seem to him the last dis- 
aster. To be with Christ "is far better," and we 
must surely feel it so, if the vital interests of our 
lives are the interests of the spiritual man in Christ 
Jesus ; if our dominant interests are the forwarding 
of his work and of his kingdom. If such are in 
reality our interests, then the meeting with our Lord 
at the judgment following death can only mean the 
entrance into a broader and more perfect life, where 
the powers of the Spirit which here function with 
difficulty under material limitations, shall find field 
for their exercise and growth in his nearer presence. 
If those moments of prayer and communion when 
we have felt his presence and his love revealed in 
our souls have been the most precious of our experi- 
ences, the memory of which has been treasured as 
foretastes of the glory that shall be revealed, then 
the thought of a state in which these are but shad- 
ows of a normal experience, but divine hints of con- 
stant joys, will cause us to face the future with 
confidence and gladness. 

The Day of Judgment is for each one of us a day 
of revealing, "when the secrets ot all hearts shall be 
disclosed." Then will the true meaning of our life 
become evident. It would seem to be a well estab- 
lished fact of observation that many, perhaps most, 
human beings are profoundly ignorant of the actual 
tendencies of their lives. Just as you shall often 



392 MEDITATIONS ON THE APOSTLES* CREED 

see a girl, through association, acquiring a tone of 
vulgarity of which she is unknowing, is, indeed, 
mistaking it for something else — for a frank man- 
ner, a friendliness of speech ; so you shall see a life 
falling into all manner of sin, so it be not gross sin — 
sins of uncharity, of spiritual indifference, of pride, 
of scorn of religious restraints, — while mistakenly 
supposing that it is merely exercising the liberty 
that belongs to all human beings. A man says, "I 
am not a sinner ; or, at least, if I am not perfect, I 
do not do much that can offend God" ; when it is 
evident that God and the relation of his soul to God, 
do not occupy his thought at all. He would deny 
any opposition to religion, but his whole life is apart 
from religion, is profoundly irreligious. The char- 
acter that he is forming has no contact with things 
of spiritual value. It is terrible to think of the mul- 
titudes of men and women one meets to-day to 
whom, so far as any practical thought or action of 
life is concerned, this world is all the world there is. 
In certain cases one understands it. Anyone who 
has worked among the very poor, whose life means 
unceasing labour amid the most adverse conditions 
for the mere support of existence, realises that any- 
thing more than the most elementary religious be- 
liefs and practices, if even so much as that, is out 
of the question ; nothing more can be found possible 
in families living in two or three rooms in tene- 



TO JUDGE THE QUICK AND THE DEAD 393 

ments, amid squalid conditions, and where the hours 
that are not hours of work are hours of weariness. 
In such cases what the light of the judgment will 
reveal must be, not so much souls hardened in sin — 
though there has been much sin of an ill-appearing 
sort — as souls stunted and dwarfed by the life that 
they have experienced. But there are other strata 
of society where life shows, not an almost forced 
neglect of the Gospel through the difficulty of con- 
ditions, but a scornful rejection of the Gospel 
through impatience of restraint. "Fulness of bread" 
would seem to be the account of much modern, as 
of much ancient, sinning. Those crowds that fill 
fashionable restaurants after the theatre and opera, 
that roll past in endless streams of motors in places 
of fashionable parade, that crowd certain summer 
resorts in the frantic pursuit of pleasure, spending 
incredible thousands upon a single entertainment, 
those whose life's motto is amusement, in the pur- 
suit of which they pass avidly from one palling 
pleasure to another — these are not following their 
path of life in ignorance of the law of God. They 
have, for the most part, been brought up in the 
knowledge of the Gospel ; they have been prepared 
for confirmation and have made their first com- 
munion ; nay, they even now, are found from time 
to time within the walls of our churches. But their 
whole lives are in revolt from the ideals of spiritual 



394 MEDITATIONS ON THE APOSTLES' CREED 

religion which they wave aside as "narrow" and 
"puritanical." Their characteristic is that they hate 
the Cross with its restrictions upon their appetites 
and passions ; their lives are in open revolt from the 
Crucified with whose sign they have been signed. 

What can the judgment mean to souls that have 
lived and died as these, but the stupefying revela- 
tion of their utter failure to create a character with 
eternal possibilities? What can the vision of the 
Judge be, but the sight of one habitually neglected 
and scorned, whose face bears the marks of their 
buffets, and whose brows are torn with the sharp- 
ness of the thorns wherewith they have crowned 
him? What more horrible fate could befall them 
than to see themselves One feels that, in any 
case, to see oneself as through God's eyes, as we 
must see ourselves at the Judgment, will be a ter- 
rible thing, even if we have chosen to live for God 
and have made the attempt to serve him. There 
will still be the revelation of the imperfection of 
that choice, and the feebleness of that service. We 
shall see our reservations in favour of self, our in- 
dulgence and half-heartedness, our shrinking from 
self-surrender and our sloth. We shall see how 
much more ready we are to ask of God than to 
give to God. There is no saint but must shrink from 
the thought of "hidden things" coming to the light — 
things hidden because of his own self-blindness. 



TO JUDGE THE QUICK AND THE DEAD 395 

But that is a small thing compared with the revela- 
tion that one's whole life has been a blunder, a mis- 
reading of values, because of the obstinacy of self- 
will. 

At any moment of our lives we may be summoned 
before the judgment-seat. Always the account is 
ready for us, is made up; always we are what we 
are, and the judgment is but the statement of that 
fact. We are at any moment what we have chosen 
to be — and we actually have chosen. From the 
possible ideals of life we have picked out one that 
is ours. We may not be conscious of the choice; 
we may seem to ourselves to have been pushed to 
the choice we have made rather by the pressure of 
circumstances than by our own deliberate will. We 
may seem to ourselves to have been dragged to the 
place where we are by the net of environment which 
we could not escape. But that is not the fact; we 
have chosen; no one can be other, spiritually, than 
he wills to be. Physically, we may have been de- 
feated by circumstances and compelled to live 
where and how we would not ; but there is no pos- 
sibility of such spiritual disaster. Whatever the 
outward setting of the life, it can there love God 
and abide in him. Nothing can separate us from 
the love of God, and if we have chosen that love we 
abide safely in it. The judgment can only reveal 
the existing fact. 



39^ MEDITATIONS ON THE APOSTLES'' CREED 

We shall face, then, at the judgment, the revela- 
tion of our own true selves ; and if we have lived 
the life of the Christian, we face the judgment with- 
out fear. Faltering may have been our obedience, 
imperfect is our accomplishment, responding far be- 
low our opportunity to the grace given to us, as we 
shall certainly recognise as we stand abashed and 
trembling before one whom we have variously dis- 
appointed; but all that, one thinks, only passingly; 
for all other feelings must be lost in the comprehen- 
sion of his unfailing love. Whatever else is true of 
us, this is surprisingly true, that we have loved him, 
and all else is pardoned to those who have loved 
much. "There is no condemnation to those who are 
in Christ Jesus." It is the great consolation of our 
Creed that we believe that he shall come to judge 
the quick and the dead. We shall stand at the 
judgment-seat of one "who loved us, and gave him- 
self for us." 

It is ill with us when we say these words as a 
threat hanging over us ; as embodying an inevitable 
fact, but a fact that has nothing of cheer. When 
that is true we enroll ourselves among those for 
whom "there remains only a fearful looking for of 
judgment." As we read the record of the early 
Church we hear the sound of a different note; to 
them the coming of our Lord in judgment was a 
thought full of hope and joy. Yes, they hoped for 



TO JUDGE THE QUICK AND THE DEAD 397 

the judgment; it was their chief consolation that 
they trusted to our Lord would come soon. His 
coming was to them the promise of deliverance. 
They bore cheerfully oppression and persecution in 
the thought that the triumphant Lord would soon 
be revealed from heaven, and their sufferings would 
cease. So their attitude was one of expectant watch- 
fulness. As the shadows of the evening fell, they 
thought that the darkness of the night might be 
shattered by the sound of the trumpet that should 
herald his appearing. When the dawn came, they 
looked eagerly eastward to see if it were the dawn 
that runs before the Sun of Righteousness. As the 
years passed what they experienced was, not relief 
at the delay of the coming of judgment, but the 
sadness of hope deferred. But they learned slowly 
to substitute for the thought of his coming to them, 
the thought of their going to him. When life here 
ended it would be that their tired eyes would open 
to the vision of their Saviour- Judge. 

The centuries, and the weakness of our faith, 
have removed from us this sense of expectancy. 
That is not well. The Coming is imminent to each 
of us. A few years more or less — what does it 
matter? Let us watch as those who wait for the 
coming of the Bridegroom — watch with our loins 
girded and our lamps burning. For, surely, he will 
come ! How or when we do not know, but we wait, 



398 MEDITATIONS ON THE APOSTLES' CREED 

expecting. The years pass, and we know that he is 
drawing nearer. The shadows creep across the sky 
and quench the light of this world, but there is a 
light beyond the hills that is unquenchable ; and 
when the shadows close here, the light breaks there. 
"He turneth the shadow of death into the morning." 

Lo ! as some venturer, from his stars receiving 

Promise and presage of sublime emprise, 
Wears evermore the seal of his believing 

Deep in the dark of solitary eyes, — 
So, even I, and with a heart more burning, 

So, even I, and with a hope more sweet, 
Groan for the hour, O Christ, of thy returning, 

Faint for the flaming of thine Advent feet 



THE NINETEENTH MEDITATION 



THE NINETEENTH MEDITATION 

I BELIEVE IN THE HOLY GHOST 

Let us listen to the words of Scripture — 



a 



ND there appeared unto them cloven tongues, 
like as of fire, and it sat upon each of them. 



Let us try to picture to ourselves — 

This scene in Jerusalem where the Apostles are 
gathered on the first Whitsunday. They have been 
waiting in obedience to our Lord's command for 
the coming of the gift that he had promised them. 
It is not at all likely that they understood the nature 
of the promised gift, but they wait. Day after day 
goes by and there is nothing. And then, this morn- 
_ing, the sound as of a rushing mighty wind, and the 
appearance of the flame. See them as the fire 
401 



4©2 MEDITATIONS ON THE APOSTLES' CREED 

hovers over their heads. There is a moment, per- 
haps, of awe-hushed silence, and they begin to 
speak. These unlearned and ignorant men speak 
boldly and clearly; and the crowd that had been 
watching gradually realises that every man present, 
whatever his nation or language, is understanding 
the words that they speak. Plainly, too, there is 
something emotional in the utterance of the Apos- 
tles; they are carried on by a power that is not 
their own so that men think that they are beside 
themselves. "These men are full of new wine," 
they mock. There is the common division of 
crowds — the division between those who want to 
understand, to learn, and those who are scornful of 
the unusual. See this division mirrored on the 
faces of the multitude ; the intent looks of some, the 
derisive looks of the mockers. Then the afflatus 
passes, and St. Peter arises to preach that first 
wonderful Christian sermon. Listen to St. Peter 
saying, "Jesus hath shed forth this which ye now 
see and hear." 

Consider, first — 

That these men upon whom the Spirit came had 
been prepared by our Lord for this which had come 
to pass. They were the chosen followers of Jesus. 
They had already been commissioned to carry on 
his work. But, as he left them, they were quite 



I BELIEVE IN THE HOLY GHOST 4°3 

incapable of taking up that work, and indeed, we 
find it hard to conceive that they even understood 
in any adequate way, what the real nature of the 
work was. Even when we think of them as pos- 
sessing much more of our Lord's teaching than is 
recorded in the Gospel, even if we take the liberty 
of filling those days between the Resurrection and 
the Ascension, that our records leave almost a 
blank, with more of intercourse with our Lord than 
seems at all likely to have taken place, it still re- 
mains that we find in them little trace of any ex- 
pectancy of taking up such a work as the conversion 
of the world. The stupendous nature of the task 
that lay before them must have grown upon them 
by degrees in any case. And assuming as much 
teaching as you like, it still remains that they were 
only taught, and the gulf between teaching and 
action in such a case is tremendous. If they were 
to act effectively they needed some impulse that 
mere teaching would not have supplied, which could 
not, indeed, have been supplied by the memory of 
the past. The significance of Pentecost is that it 
supplied this impulse — it gave them the presence in 
them and action on them of God the Holy Ghost. 
Henceforth they are men spirit-filled. Their words 
ring with a certainty, their actions have an unhesi- 
tating boldness, that would be utterly surprising to 
us were we not so familiar with the cause. There 



404 MEDITATIONS ON THE APOSTLES' CREED 

is in them no trace of tentative action or doubtful 
experiment. They go about their world-conquering 
business with a courageous certainty, a disregard of 
consequences, which is the indication of minds in 
which there is no shadow of doubt as to, not only 
the general nature of their work, but as to the prac- 
tical steps by which it is to be conducted. The 
coming of the Holy Spirit has changed them into 
other men. 

Consider j second — 

That the gift of the Spirit was not a temporary 
one for the supply of the necessities of the Apostles. 
The gift of the Spirit is a perpetual gift to the 
whole Church. He came as the Spirit of guidance 
to lead the Church into all truth. This work was 
not accomplished once for all in the direction given 
to Apostolic lives. The Church has to be guided 
into the truth in each generation, guided to the solu- 
tion of the new questions that each generation pre- 
sents. There will never be an end of the need of 
the Spirit's guidance till the end of the Kingdom 
come. And a part of that guidance is the guidance 
of the individual Christian to the appropriation and 
use of so much of the truth as is sufficient for his 
needs. We expect not only that the Church will be 
guided to meet successfully the problems raised in 
the course of its attempt to conquer the world for 



I BELIEVE IN THE HOLY GHOST 405 

Christ ; but we expect that our own individual prob- 
lems will find their solution through the presence in 
us of the same Spirit. Indeed, as the Church can- 
not do its work apart from us, its work is, in a way, 
dependent upon our response to the impulses of the 
Spirit. We need, then, ever to be seeking the guid- 
ance of the Spirit in the intimate details of our own 
lives; to review those lives constantly in the light 
of his inspired teaching; to seek through his guid- 
ance to find the mind of Christ; to review in the 
interior light of his leading all our thoughts and 
actions, doing nothing except it first be submitted to 
him. To be led of the Spirit is the aspiration of 
the Christian's life. 

Let us, then, pray — 

That we may submit ourselves utterly to the guid- 
ance of the Holy Ghost. Pray that you may be 
filled with the spirit of obedience. Pray that you 
may never resist his will. 

O God, forasmuch as without thee, we are not 
able to please thee ; mercifully grant that thy Holy 
Spirit may in all things direct and rule our hearts ; 
through Jesus Christ, our Lord. 

Our belief in the Holy Ghost is belief in a Person 
who is God and who from all eternity has been 
God ; not created, not begotten, but proceeding from 



406 MEDITATIONS ON THE APOSTLES' CREED 

the Father and the Son, the Third Person of the 
Adorable and Ever-Blessed Trinity. It is belief 
that this Person who is Lord and Life-Giver, works 
and has worked in the world as creative and con- 
structive power, both in the realm of the natural 
and of the spiritual, being in both the principle of 
order, of life and of illumination. It is belief that 
we, through our incorporation into the Body of 
Christ, are, in a way that was impossible before the 
Incarnation, brought into relation to the life of God 
the Holy Trinity, and are become subject to the 
action of the Holy Spirit who has become to us an 
immediate source of inspiration and energy. Our 
souls are cleansed and stimulated by him, our minds 
are illumined, our consciences are directed, and our 
very bodies are become his temples. He interprets 
the mind of God to us. 

In this meditation, of course, I shall not be able 
to do more than touch on one or two aspects of the 
work of the Holy Spirit, and that very cursorily. 
The position that our profession of belief in him 
holds in the Creed suggests that we do not at all 
touch on the work of the Spirit as it is revealed in 
creation and the general guidance of the world and 
man, but rather confine ourselves to his work in 
connection with the Body of Christ, his revealing 
and illuminating work in those who are members of 
the Body. 



I BELIEVE IN THE HOLY GHOST 4°7 

There is a group of sayings of our Lord which 
were intended to prepare his followers for the 
change in the method of the divine action which 
would result from the removal from them of his 
visible presence. Our Lord would seem to have had 
in mind the strain to which the disciples would be 
subjected immediately after the Ascension. In their 
bewilderment they would need clear guidance lest 
at the critical moment they should take the wrong 
turn. How very real a danger this was we see by 
the narration of the events that immediately fol- 
lowed our Lord's death. We get the situation viv- 
idly summed up in a few graphic words in the Gos- 
pel of St. John. "Simon Peter saith unto them, I 
go a-fishing. They say unto him, We also go with 
thee." It was the instinctive return of discouraged 
men to a familiar way of life, in which, at any rate, 
they would feel the ground solid under their feet. 
It was a situation that was bound to arise, and 
which our Lord, foreseeing, provided against. His 
teaching about the Holy Spirit, the Comforter, who 
should come and abide with them forever; who 
should lead them into all the truth and should inter- 
pret to them his mind and make clear to them the 
meaning of his instruction and action, was intended 
to put them in an attitude of expectancy and set 
their faces toward the future as containing events 
which would explain much that was dark in his 



4° 8 MEDITATIONS ON THE APOSTLES'' CREED 

teaching, and put their relation to him on a new 
and deeper basis. "I have yet many things to say 
unto you, but ye cannot bear them now," he said, 
pointing them to the future, when, because of their 
new relation to him their intercourse would be re- 
sumed under conditions that would make possible a 
fuller impartation of his mind in that they would 
then be in the possession of a new capacity of under- 
standing. It was vital that they should at least 
grasp the fact that this new relation and this new 
capacity of understanding were conditioned upon 
his further action in sending to them the Spirit. 

With this much in mind, we are in a position to 
understand that one of the effects of the coming of 
the Holy Ghost would be to restore to them the 
sense of our Lord's presence with them. His words, 
that it was expedient for them that he go away, 
would have been a very hard saying to them; but 
now they would find that the withdrawal of his 
visible presence was essential to his restoration to 
them in the power of his Risen Life. This restora- 
tion was effected by the vital action of the Holy 
Spirit in unifying the Risen Humanity of our Lord 
with those whom he had redeemed, so that they 
should become one Body, of which the Holy Spirit 
himself is henceforth the Life. It was through this 
action of the Spirit that they became conscious of 
Jesus, not as the cherished memory of a departed 



I BELIEVE IN THE HOLY GHOST 409 

friend and teacher, but in the conviction of an in- 
dwelling presence which was never separated from 
their souls. It was under the inspiration of this 
truth that they began to think and speak of them- 
selves as "in Christ," and one with him and with 
each other. 

When we attempt to reconstruct the experience 
through which the Apostles passed immediately 
after Pentecost, with a view to gain light on the 
methods of spiritual experience in general, thinking 
of their experience, as we must, as being in essen- 
tials the normal Christian experience, we try to 
understand what, in their action, would have been 
the mediating fact, bringing home to them the re- 
stored Presence of our Lord ; that is, through what 
means did the Holy Spirit work in doing this ? We 
are too much inclined to think of illumination of the 
mind as being all that was required — the dogmatic 
truth imparted by revelation and gradually appro- 
priated in thought until its meaning became plain. 
But it would seem clear that that could not have 
been altogether the method. It is, to be sure, very 
much our own method of getting at truth ; but the 
results of our use of the method hardly justify the 
procedure. We receive a truth that is taught us 
and turn it over in the mind until we say we under- 
stand it — and much of our ineffectiveness, as Chris- 
tians is due to the fact that we stop at that point, 



4*0 MEDITATIONS ON THE APOSTLES' CREED 

contented with the result. I do not think that the 
Apostles would have been any more effective than 
we are if they had stopped with intellectual appro- 
priation of truth. The work of the Holy Spirit has 
only begun when he has led men so far. There 
must be a further appropriation and use of truth. 
And I think that we can see the process of media- 
tion by which the revealed truth of their vital and 
corporate union with their Risen Master passed 
from the sphere of intellectual appropriation to that 
of personal experience in the case of the Apostles. 
They became sure that what they were taught was 
a fact when they experienced the indwelling pres- 
ence of our Lord in their souls. And this passage 
from intellectual conviction to personal experience, 
I have no doubt, was mediated by the Holy Euchar- 
ist. If we are to understand the work of the Holy 
Spirit in the Body of the Incarnation, we must un- 
derstand it, in large measure, as a sacramental work. 
As we turn the pages of the book of the Acts of 
the Apostles with a view to understanding the Apos- 
tolic experience in the days immediately following 
Pentecost, we find that the Holy Eucharist occupied 
a central place in the religious life of the commu- 
nity from the very beginning. The popular impres- 
sion that the place assigned by Catholics to the 
Holy Eucharist is a matter of late development is 
very wide of the facts. Among St. Luke's notes of 



I BELIEVE IN THE HOLY GHOST 4H 

the unity of the Christian body is that they contin- 
ued steadfast in the breaking of the bread, which 
sacrament was daily celebrated "in the house," that 
is, no doubt, in that upper room where they were 
accustomed to assemble. Their first Eucharist 
must have been an hour of wondrous experience. 
Through it they would have come into communion 
with their Risen Lord by the way that was hence- 
forth to be their constant means of approach to 
him. Jesus was once more with them — that would 
be the fact of their daily experience. He who loved 
them and gave himself for them was still loving 
and giving himself. Day by day, as they knelt 
about whatever improvised "altar" they may have 
had, the fact of his restored Presence, now the very 
life of their souls, would have filled their hearts 
with joy and gladness. There would as yet be no 
"theology of the Real Presence," and there would 
be no need of it: the supreme fact of their daily 
experience would be, "Jesus is here." They would 
have been slower to realise that the presence with 
them of the Risen Jesus was a permanently consti- 
tuted relation to be disturbed or broken only by the 
awful fact of sin ; that they were permanently united 
to him because they had become members of his 
Body, participants in his divine and heavenly life — 
that they were one body with him, dwelling in him 
and he in them. 



412 MEDITATIONS ON THE APOSTLES CREED 

It was the constructive action of the Holy Spirit 
that built up, if one may so state it, this new and 
inner relation of Christ with the souls of his disci- 
ples, and which gave them the spiritual comprehen- 
sion which led them to the gradual understanding 
of their own experience and enabled them to for- 
mulate it in their teaching as the central fact of the 
Christian life. It is one of the chief works of the 
Holy Spirit to guide Christians to the analysis and 
statement of experience, and this work is as need- 
ful to-day as it ever was. It is no doubt true that 
Christian experience has been analysed and stated 
in the teaching of the Church ; that we do not now 
approach the facts of Christian living altogether 
unprepared, but rather, they present themselves to 
us as verifications of truth we have been taught. 
Yet it remains true that each man's experience is 
unique and that he needs the illumination of the 
Holy Spirit in his appreciation of it. Our Lord 
unites himself with the souls of all true believers, 
but the manifestation of his Presence is diverse; 
and it is easy for us to miss the significance of it if 
we are unheedful of the Spirit's voice. This is 
especially true when we have passed beyond that 
immature stage which is usually marked by emo- 
tional experiences, to settled Christian living, the 
reactions of which are to be found, not in the emo- 
tions, but in the will. We may then easily misjudge 



I BELIEVE IN THE HOLY GHOST 413 

ourselves and misread the phenomena of settled 
obedience as the evidence of luke-warmness. In 
such case we are tempted to resort to spiritual stim- 
ulants, and by "special devotions" whip the spiritual 
nerves to a momentary excitement, only to experi- 
ence, after a short interval, a real relapse. But if 
we are praying much to the Blessed Spirit for 
guidance we shall be led to understand the insignifi- 
cance of stirred emotions as evidence of a life pleas- 
ing to our Lord and united to him, and shall find 
our test of fidelity and acceptance in the obedient 
love that is evidenced by an unswerving devotion 
to his will. He is Christ's, not who has found re- 
ligious services and actions emotionally exciting, 
but he "who has crucified the flesh, with the affec- 
tions and lusts." 

As we try to understand the spiritual experience 
of the Apostles after Pentecost, as that experience 
was developed under the guidance of the Holy 
Spirit, we note that their experience of union with 
the Risen Jesus had the effect of preventing their 
religion from fixing its attention too exclusively on 
the earthly life of our Lord. That, one cannot help 
feeling, was a real danger. It is a danger to which 
Christians have succumbed again and again. All 
those types of religion which have made the follow- 
ing of our Lord's example the supreme thing have 
yielded to this temptation. But the members of the 



414 MEDITATIONS ON THE APOSTLES' CREED 

rirst communities escaped it because their relation to 
our Lord was not one of memory but of present 
experience. Their religion never had a backward, 
but always a forward, look. They expected the re- 
turn of the Lord from heaven — that was no doubt 
an important element in producing a forward look- 
ing religion; but more important than that belief, 
and still operative when that belief grew dim in the 
lapse of years, was their sense of the continual 
presence of our Lord with them. Whether his com- 
ing in the clouds of heaven were soon or long de- 
layed, the fact remained that he was with them 
now. What Christianity meant to them was not 
following Christ, or expecting Christ, but living in 
Christ. It was that that made them such wonderful 
servants of Christ as they went out to preach him 
and his kingdom. A religion whose centre is in the 
past, that looks back and tries to imitate ; a religion 
whose centre is in the future, which looks forward 
and expects events ; both alike lack dynamic. But a 
religion of which the centre is a present relation to 
the living Christ with whom it deals now, and to 
whose will it is responsive at every moment, is 
capable of sustained action on the world and the 
individual. It may be as "unworldly" as you like; 
but because its true work is response to the will of 
a present Lord its effects must be wrought in pres- 
ent time and on present society. It cannot neglect 



I BELIEVE IN THE HOLY GHOST 41 5 

these if it would. The impulses of the Holy Spirit 
compel it to action, drive it, not to the imitation of 
the Christ-life, but to its reproduction, with all its 
purifying and regenerative powers, in the world 
where it manifests itself. A world in which the 
Spirit of Christ is released into activity through its 
members is necessarily a world that is being re- 
formed by the action of that Spirit. Just as the spir- 
itual advance of the individual is conditioned upon 
his correspondence to the Spirit of Christ that dwells 
in him, so the spiritual improvement of the world is 
conditioned upon its response to the ideals of the 
spiritual society which is being revealed and built 
up within it. 

I have dwelt thus, in this meditation, on the work 
of the Blessed Spirit as a constructive work effect- 
ing our incorporation into the Body of Christ and 
sustaining us in the union of that Body, because 
this is not the side of his work that is usually dwelt 
upon. Indeed, much that I have read on the work 
of the Holy Spirit has made upon me the impression 
of a separate activity on his part, as though he were 
taking up a work that our Lord had laid down. But 
as relates to the Body of Christ, the Christian 
Church, he is the Spirit of Christ, given because 
Christ is glorified, who takes of the things of Christ 
and shows them unto us. There are not separate 
and successive actions of the Persons of the Blessed 



41 6 MEDITATIONS ON THE APOSTLES' CREED 

Trinity, but a unity of will in related actions, in 
which, for purposes of clearness of thought, we 
emphasise one or another feature of the action, as 
the work of one or another Person of the Trinity. 
It is needful at times, to mark this fact, lest we have 
the appearance of forgetting the unity of God in our 
forms of stating the activities of the Persons in God. 
What we are thinking of now is still the work of the 
Incarnation, only stated under such modified condi- 
tions that the office of the Holy Spirit in the Body 
of Christ is emphasised. 

With so much of warning, we may turn to this 
other point, that it is the office of the Holy Spirit to 
create in the members of the Body of Christ a spir- 
itual mind and judgment. I am not speaking of 
inspiration, but of that inner harmony of thought 
and will between the believer and Christ which en- 
ables us to look at life and judge it with the practical 
certainty that our judgment is in accord with the 
mind of our Lord, and indeed, because of our in- 
dwelling in him, is his mind. I do not mean that 
our inner illumination is such as to enable us to 
dispense with, or to justify us in disregard of, the 
external teaching of the Body of Christ, or to set 
ourselves in opposition to our normal spiritual 
guides ; but I mean that through the operation of 
the Holy Spirit upon our own spiritual nature, and 
especially upon our surrendered intellects and wills, 



I BELIEVE IN THE HOLY GHOST 4*7 

we grow instinctively to respond to his monitions, 
and so become habituated to think of life in terms 
of its spiritual values that our judgments upon life 
may be trusted to be in accord with truth. The 
liberty wherewith we have been made free is rooted 
and grounded in this : That our relations to Christ 
and his Spirit are so intimate that we are certain to 
be in accord with them in thought and action, or, 
if not, we shall at any rate be conscious of the dis- 
accord. Practically, what I mean is this : That in 
those constant daily decisions that we perforce must 
make, whether intellectual upon truth, or moral 
upon conduct, if we are conscious of being faithful 
and loving members of our Lord, seeking, not self, 
but him and his glory, we may trust ourselves to 
decide rightly; we may properly rely on our en- 
lightened judgment. It is only when we find that 
our minds are clouded and prejudiced by sin that 
we need hesitate. The Christian needs a certain 
self-reliance, which yet is not self-reliance, but reli- 
ance upon the fact that he is in Christ and Christ 
in him, and that his soul is the abode of the Spirit 
of truth and guidance. We need a certain robust- 
ness of faith that will counteract any tendency to 
morbidity. It is usually morbidity and scrupulosity, 
with symptoms of spiritual infirmity, which makes 
people substitute an exterior conscience for the 
conscience God has given them, and insist upon hav- 



41 8 MEDITATIONS ON THE APOSTLES' CREED 

ing their mind and conscience made up for them 
rather than, in trust in the Presence that is within 
them, making them up for themselves. It is better 
for us to make mistakes in good faith, and after 
earnest thought and prayer, than to avoid mistakes, 
if we can so avoid them, by a method that leaves us 
spiritual parasites and weaklings. I recognise fully 
that there is such a thing as legitimate direction; 
that there are times when we need exterior help 
and guidance; that such help and guidance, too, is 
one of the instruments of the Holy Spirit. But 
what we need is help and guidance, not the substi- 
tution of another will and conscience for our own. 
For the most part what leads people to seek guid- 
ance is not ignorance, but a feeble will that shrinks 
from meeting duty, and a timorous faith that is 
afraid to trust itself to God. Sometimes, too, it is 
a foolish desire to talk about oneself, which is quite 
one of the lower forms of pride. We can solve most 
of our daily problems in our meditations and com- 
munions. 

And to do so, I repeat, is not the way of self- 
sufficiency, but of steadfast faith. I do not believe 
that the Holy Spirit leaves any one without guid- 
ance who throws himself upon him in a spirit of 
faith and self-surrendered will. I think that we can 
all look back into our lives and see there times of 
crisis when important decisions had to be made. We 



I BELIEVE IN THE HOLY GHOST 419 

can see now the spirit in which we made them ; we 
can see whether we took them to our Lord and 
asked his help and the guidance of the Holy Spirit ; 
whether we made them the intention of our com- 
munions and fought them to a decision on our 
knees ; or whether we made our decision in a purely 
worldly spirit and upon considerations of expedi- 
ency. If the former was our course, I do not be- 
lieve that we shall find any case in which we have 
since seen reason to regret our decision. We have 
again and again verified in our experience God's 
promise that we shall be taught of him. It may, no 
doubt, have been true, that when we made our deci- 
sion we were not altogether clear in our own minds, 
and were only certain that we were acting for what 
seemed the best. But the future demonstrated the 
wisdom of our choice, and that it was the choice of 
a soul that sought God and was taught of him. 



THE TWENTIETH MEDITATION 



THE TWENTIETH MEDITATION 

THE HOLY CATHOLIC CHURCH 

Let us listen to the words of St. Paul — 



Z 



HE Church, which is his Body, the fulness of 
him that fillest all in all. 



Let us picture — 

A church in a city street when the congregation 
is coming together for worship. Those who are 
coming in here are widely separated from one an- 
other in the ordinary interests of their lives. Mas- 
ters and servants, employers and employees, day- 
laborers and school children, women of the world 
and shop girls, they are divided from one another 
by ideals that never touch. That hard-faced man 
is the manager of a great business ; what has he in 
common with that rough-handed old woman who 

423 



424 MEDITATIONS ON THE APOSTLES CREED 

manages to exist from week to week by scrubbing 
floors? Is there any point of contact for either 
with that over-dressed girl who is full of the mem- 
ories of last night's party, and is looking for some 
one with whom to talk them over? Stand here 
in imagination at the church door and read the 
faces of the passers: how they bear the marks of 
their course of life ; how they mirror the charac- 
ters of men and women. What different life-his- 
tories you can read there ! And yet there is some 
force that is acting on each one of them, a force 
that makes their paths converge this morning at 
the church door. They pass in, one by one, for the 
most part without greeting, but once within the 
church they all seem to be fused into an unity, to 
be touched by the spirit of a common purpose. As 
the Eucharistic service goes on you lose the sense 
of individual worshippers in the sense of an united 
action, till, as their heads bow at the elevation, 
they are absolutely merged in the unity of the su- 
preme act of worship, when with angels and arch- 
angels and all the company of heaven, they bow 
in adoration before the veiled presence of their 
God. 

Consider, first — 

That we accent too much the external differ- 
ences that divide us one from another, permitting 



THE HOLY CATHOLIC CHURCH 4 2 5 

ourselves to be the sport of appearances. But be- 
tween the banker and the wash-woman the condi- 
tions of life that separate are of less importance 
and less strong than the ties that unite. There is 
something more than a conventional meaning in 
the phrase, "our common humanity"; and in any 
of the great crises of life the ties of this common 
humanity will show themselves stronger than the 
repulsions of class conventions. And there is a 
deep meaning, too, in our "common Christianity." 
Men and women who sit in the same church and 
join in the same worship and partake of the same 
sacraments, feel that there is between them a real 
and a deep relation. They are partakers of the 
same hope and respond to the same inspirations 
and share the same aspirations. That the mem- 
bers of the same congregation feel, or, as we say, 
realise, their relation to one another so feebly and 
passingly is because we all pay our chief attention 
to the surface of life. But you cannot understand 
the mystery and the life of the set by watching the 
play of the wind upon its surface from day to day ; 
nor can you estimate human life by its surface oc- 
cupations and interests. There is in all men and 
women a hidden life which is the real man or 
woman. It is in this secret life that the significance 
of the human being lies concealed. And it is by 
the realities of this hidden life that we touch one 



426 MEDITATIONS ON THE APOSTLES' CREED 

another ; it is there that we find an unity that is an 
effective bond constraining us to a oneness that is 
essential and abiding. 

Consider, second — 

That this unity is one that arises from the pos- 
session of a common life. The Incarnate Life of 
our Lord is the Life of his Body and of all its 
members. We are all one in Christ Jesus. It is 
no doubt to be desired that our unity should mani- 
fest itself in our social relations in a deepening 
sense of brotherhood. The brotherhood of them 
that believe should be a more obvious thing than 
is actually the case. But is it not true that we 
underestimate its power and extent? Our lives 
tend to go their own way, immersed in their own 
personal interests ; they are filled with exacting de- 
tails, subject to increasing demands upon their 
energies ; but let there come a demand that is clear 
upon our brotherly relation to other members of 
the Body, and is it true that the common experi- 
ence is failure? I do not think so. It is within 
our knowledge, is it not, that men acknowledge 
readily the ties of spiritual relationship, indeed, of 
common humanity? Let any one be in trouble, 
and kindness and sympathy are unfailing. Our 
chief failure is not in these qualities or in readiness 
to exercise them; but failure in attention, failure 



THE HOLY CATHOLIC CHURCH 4*7 

to notice and estimate needs that are not pressed 
upon us. We respond to the calls of brotherhood, 
but we so often wait for the call to be vocal, and 
are unheedful of the silent call of opportunity. 
And it is true, too, that we fail in our grasp on the 
spiritual nature of our lives, fail in conscious esti- 
mate of them as regenerate lives, lives of which 
the spiritual activities should be characteristic and 
constant. We do not enough seek expression for 
the inner life, and the consequence is that that life 
remains too subterranean and inappreciable. An 
intense realisation of our incorporation into Christ 
and our vital union with him will energise all our 
spiritual activities. 

Let us, then, pray — 

That we may know ourselves as members of the 
Body of Christ; that we may see more clearly the 
obligations of that membership to our risen Head 
and to one another. 

O Almighty God, who has built thy Church upon 
the foundation of the Apostles and Prophets, 
Jesus Christ himself being the head corner-stone; 
Grant us so to be joined together in unity of spirit 
by their doctrine, that we may be made an holy 
temple acceptable unto thee, through Jesus Christ, 
our Lord. 



4«8 MEDITATIONS ON THE APOSTLES* CREED 

I believe in the Holy Catholic Church. That 
Church is the Body of Christ. That is at once the 
simplest and most comprehensive definition of it. 
It attaches it definitely to the Incarnation and 
stresses the fact that the Incarnation of our Lord 
was not a passing incident in the divine process of 
redemption, but a permanent mode of the divine 
action by which we are ever being rescued from 
sin and spiritual death. 

The primary conception under which the Church 
is presented to us in the Gospels is that of the 
Kingdom : the Kingdom of Heaven is at hand is 
the preparatory announcement ; and much of our 
Lord's teaching is taken up with indicating one or 
another aspect of the Kingdom's life and work. 
The impression that the teaching as a whole makes 
upon us is that there is impending a spiritual event 
which will manifest the power and the glory of 
God, and will vindicate his rule in the world by 
the destruction of the wicked and the establish- 
ment of the righteous in the Kingdom of the Mes- 
siah. If we decline to interpret our Lord's utter- 
ances by the light that subsequent events have 
thrown back upon them, and insist upon a literal 
understanding of the most emphatic of his sayings 
in regard to the nature and appearance of the 
Kingdom of Heaven, we should, no doubt, find 
that the slow establishment of the Church and its 



THE HOLY CATHOLIC CHURCH 429 

age-long history, satisfy but inadequately the con- 
ceptions we have formed of the nature of the King- 
dom and its coming. We should be driven to the 
conclusion that the Church, as we see it in history, 
is something quite other than the Kingdom of 
Heaven as it was conceived by our Lord and un- 
derstood by his immediate followers. But I do not 
believe that that method of interpretation is a nec- 
essary, or a legitimate one, at least for a Christian, 
who is convinced on independent grounds of our 
Lord's divinity. We are entitled, I think, to inter- 
pret our Lord's utterances in regard to the Kingdom 
that it was his purpose to announce and to set up, in 
the light of the history of the kingdom itself. Proph- 
ecy is not inverted history; and it rarely happens 
that from the prophecies of an event we can de- 
termine what the exact nature of the event will be. 
The thing prophesied usually surprises us by being 
much greater in content than we should have in- 
ferred from the prophecy of it. This is true of 
the prophecies of the coming of our Lord himself. 
The expectations of a personal intervention of God 
in the history and life of Israel for its deliverance 
and redemption which were created in the minds 
of devout meditators upon the institutions of Israel 
and the writings of its prophets, fall very far short 
of the Incarnation of God for the redemption of 
the world. The Incarnation and Atonement went 



43° MEDITATIONS ON THE APOSTLES* CREED 

far beyond any meaning that the prophets them- 
selves could have attached to their utterances. And 
yet their meaning is included in the Incarnation ; 
and the Incarnation is the only complete and ade- 
quate fulfilment of their prophecies. So it is in 
regard to the Gospel utterances in relation to the 
Kingdom of God. The Kingdom when it came 
was a much greater fact than we should have in- 
ferred from the prophecies and descriptions of it. 
Our Lord was compelled, it would seem, to pre- 
sent his thought of the Kingdom in such terms as 
were familiar to his hearers, with the risk of a cer- 
tain amount of temporary misunderstanding, and 
to leave to the future a more adequate expression 
of the nature of the Kingdom, when experience of 
the life of the Kingdom had made comprehension 
of the nature of it possible. At the same time his 
parabolic teaching contains many a hint that was 
at the time disregarded, or indeed, misunderstood, 
but which we to-day can see contain the adequate 
corrective of a belief in an immediate manifesta- 
tion of the Kingdom of God in a catastrophic Day 
of Judgment. 

The element that was needed to enable the fol- 
lowers of our Lord to comprehend the nature of 
the Kingdom of God was lacking until the Ascen- 
sion. Not until then could they understand the 
meaning of the Incarnation; not until then could 



THE HOLY CATHOLIC CHURCH 43 1 

they understand that the Kingdom of Heaven was 
not essentially a rule of God over men, but a rule 
of God in and through men — not a rule exercised 
compulsively upon subjects, but an expression of 
God through children who had become united to 
him. When men could see, as St. Paul at once saw, 
that the essence of Christianity is the union of God 
and man through the mediation of the God-Man, 
Christ Jesus, then they could rapidly think their 
way through neglected phases of our Lord's teach- 
ing to the conception of the Kingdom of God as 
the Body of the Incarnation of which Christ is the 
Head and all Christians the members; then they 
could see the Church as "his Body, the fulness of 
him that filleth all in all." It is inevitable that in 
constructing our body of belief, we do so by putting 
together those elements that we can understand out 
of the total mass of teaching to which we have 
access, neglecting those elements that are incom- 
prehensible to us. Then, as we come to under- 
stand the meaning of these neglected truths, we 
take them into our system, effecting the necessary 
adjustments. It would be absurd if at any time 
we were to insist on wiping out all our knowledge 
and experience that were subsequent to a certain 
date, and insist upon producing a Creed on the 
basis of the earlier ascertained facts. Yet that is 
what we are asked to do when we are invited to 



43 a MEDITATIONS ON THE APOSTLES' CREED 

form a conception of the Kingdom of God on the 
basis of the understanding that our Lord's imme- 
iiate hearers must have had of his words. Rather, 
we are entitled to the interpretation of his words 
that was arrived at by his followers through the 
experience that came to them as the result of his 
Resurrection and Ascension. 

And that interpretation was that the Church is 
"his Body, the fulness of him that filleth all in all." 
Our relation to that Body, it came to be under- 
stood, was effected through the sacrament of bap- 
tism. By that sacrament we are incorporated into 
Christ and reckoned among his members. The 
Body of Christ, therefore, presents itself to us as 
a growing Body. The Incarnation spreads and in- 
creases as ever more human beings are brought 
into the Body. Christ becomes, in a true sense, 
ever more and more Incarnate, as the Vine grows 
with ever-expanding life. We see, therefore, how 
the Church must be Catholic and One, and that 
this catholicity and unity have to do with the rela- 
tion of the members with the Head, rather than 
with their relations with one another. Catholicity 
and unity are inherent aspects of the divine life, 
rather than external relations of members of the 
Body. The Church is not Catholic in the sense 
that it contains all men; it was Catholic from the 
very beginning in that it was capable of minister- 



THE HOLY CATHOLIC CHURCH 433 

ing to the needs of all men, in that it was consti- 
tuted to be the custodian of the entire revelation 
of God and of the grace needful for the sanctifica- 
tion of humanity. It taught and teaches the whole 
truth ; it offers itself to all men as the medium of 
salvation. So its Unity is the Unity of a Body — 
the Unity of all members with the Head of the 
Body. All who have been baptised into Christ and 
abide in living union with him are his members. 

The effectiveness both of the Catholicity and of 
the Unity of the Church are hindered by the ex- 
ternal divisions of its members. Hence the press- 
ing nature of the problem of Church Unity. "Our 
unhappy divisions" must be felt as grievous spir- 
itual loss by all who at all realise the meaning of 
the problems involved. At the same time, however 
much we may lament our disastrous state, I am 
unable to see that we are making any progress 
toward the solution of our difficulties, or are likely 
to make any. I can only speak for myself, but to 
me it seems that present attempts at unity are 
bound to fail because they are proceeding on fun- 
damentally wrong lines. They aim at the attain- 
ment of some sort of external uniformity, — and 
uniformity and unity are quite different things. 
Unity through obedience to the dicta of an external 
centre of unity, and unity through agreement on a 
platform containing a certain minimum of alleged 



434 MEDITATIONS ON THE APOSTLES' CREED 

"essential doctrines," leaving a large margin of 
belief and practice to liberty of choice, alike are 
futile. The Unity of the Body of Christ is ex- 
pressed neither by a governmental unity, in its es- 
sence purely secular and borrowed in conception 
from the "Kings of the Gentiles," nor by some sort 
of social compact, borrowed from democratic social 
ideals. It were well if we could drop all attempts 
to recreate a church unity on the analogy of secular 
models, and get to understand that the essential 
Unity of the Church exists, because it never has 
been destroyed, and set ourselves to the realisation 
of this essential unity in our lives. The Church 
of God was not one, and then, through human 
sin, split into many churches, leaving us with 
the problem of reconstituting them into a unity 
once more. The Church of God is, as it al- 
ways has been, and as it cannot otherwise be, 
One, and our problem is the realising of that 
Unity in a living experience. Our Lord's prayer 
for his disciples was not that they might be 
united in uniform obedience to a visible Head, nor 
that they might agree upon a certain minimum of 
doctrine and practice, but that they may be one, 
"as thou, Father, art in me, and I in thee." That 
is, the unity we are to look for and pray for and 
work for, is the unity that is an outcome of dwell- 
ing in God and God in us : it is the unity of those 



THE HOLY CATHOLIC CHURCH 435 

who are "in Christ," realising that unity in their 
relations to one another. When we shall succeed 
in being one with God, that unity will of itself 
prevent us from being at enmity one with another. 
The fundamental note of the Church is not Apos- 
tolicity or Catholicity or Unity, but Sanctity. When 
once we have learned this we shall have no diffi- 
culty in travelling the road to unity — but not till 
then. The history of the Church is a history of 
divisions caused by the unholiness of its members, 
members whose vocation is the vocation to sanctity. 
Made members of the Holy Body of Christ, and 
put in contact with the means for the attainment 
of personal holiness, they have failed to do this; 
and so failing have been the cause of the divisions 
of Christendom. And to-day, instead of realising 
the cause and meaning of our failure and setting 
ourselves humbly to the pursuit of holiness with 
the well-founded hope that unity will follow in 
good time, we concern ourselves with schemes for 
the attainment of unity which are predestined to 
failure from their very nature. The holiness of 
the Anglican Priesthood is an end much more to 
be desired and laboured for than the recognition 
of Anglican Orders by the Papal See ; and a body 
of laity which shall display the marks of a true 
and deep communion with our Lord will be more 
influential in winning a recognition of the true 



43 6 MEDITATIONS ON THE APOSTLES* CREED 

Catholicity of the Protestant Episcopal Church 
than a change of name. For the present the Ameri- 
can Church needs to concentrate its attention upon 
its own spiritual state, and fit itself to be a leader 
to Unity before it offers itself to be one. 

I believe in the Holy Catholic Church. That 
Church is the sphere of supernatural action. Be- 
cause its members are members of the Body of 
Christ, the powers and graces of the Risen Christ 
are manifested through them. We are made mem- 
bers of Christ's Body in order that his Incarnate 
work may be carried on in and through us. The 
members of the Body are more than the repre- 
sentation of Christ, they are the expression of him — 
they are the medium through which Christ ex- 
presses himself to the world. What the world 
knows of Christ it learns from the members of his 
Body. Our real testimony to the truth of Chris- 
tianity is not found in the force or facility with 
which we are able to defend Christian theory, but 
in the degree in which our lives are representative 
of Christ's life. Whether those supreme qualities 
which in him have proved so endlessly fascinating 
to men were just the unique adornment of One 
Man, or can be endlessly reproduced by all men 
through union with him — that is the testimony that 
the lives of Christians are expected to offer. It is 
as to that point that you and I are called to give 
evidence. 



THE HOLY CATHOLIC CHURCH 437 

And what evidence have we to give ? I fancy that 
there are many members of the Church who con- 
sider that conformity to the routine of the Chris- 
tian life is a sufficient expression of their member- 
ship in the Christian Body. "I fast twice in the 
week, and give tithes of all that I possess," would 
seem to be an adequate expression of that point of 
view : only when we come to state it in those terms 
we become aware that it has suffered pointed criti- 
cism. The fact is that no routine is of much value, 
save for its steadying power. It may exist as an 
imitation or as a survival, without any trace of 
spiritual activity. If our lives are to be evidential 
lives it must be because they are able to change the 
points of a routine into actions of a high spiritual 
potency. I may go through the day's routine of 
prayer and have utterly failed to find prayer a spir- 
itually effective act. But if prayer is a true ex- 
pression of spiritual desire and aspiration, still 
more, if it is the medium of spiritual vision, I shall 
lose my sense of routine even while observing it. 
All spiritual activities which are so performed as to 
be releases of spiritual power, exercise a trans- 
forming power in our lives. They effect changes 
that soon make themselves manifest in character. 
First of all we experience the change ourselves. 
There comes a morning when we know that our 
communion has been a real experience of our Lord's 



43 8 MEDITATIONS ON THE APOSTLES' CREED 

presence. There comes a day when we are able to 
carry the meaning of our meditation with a good 
deal of success into the details of our life. And we 
find that such experiences as these, which make 
themselves evident to us, as spiritual and inner 
experiences, are making themselves felt in a greater 
power of control and direction in the exterior life. 
Their fruits grow and ripen, and so make them- 
selves evident to all who know us. We are losing 
interest in a good many things which before 
seemed important. The tone of our conversation 
changes; we find that much that we were accus- 
tomed to say was profitless and had better be left 
unsaid. We find that the estimate of the import- 
ance of the things that we have to do alters, and 
that we now have time for the things that we de- 
clined to do because we were so busy. 

The result of this gradual movement of the life 
is that we begin to experience where we had only 
believed: we begin to find what it means to be a 
member of Christ. We thought that we knew that 
before, but it turns out that we did not; and we 
have passed into a new world of spiritual experi- 
ence in finding it. We had read about this world, 
and people had tried to tell us about it and we 
thought that we understood, but now it is plain 
that we did not. There are things that we can 
only understand through experience of them. 



THE HOLY CATHOLIC CHURCH 439 

Great fundamental notions, love, honour, glory, 
beauty, no one can explain to us — we know them or 
we do not; that is, we have experienced them or 
we have not. It is so with the teaching of our 
Lord as to life; those wonderful qualities of the 
Sermon on the Mount are completely unintelligible 
till they have become ours. Men worry them- 
selves in explanation — and explain nothing; and 
then the day comes when we acquire an experience 
and we know ; we know what it is to become hum- 
ble and pure and peaceable and self-sacrificing ; and 
the world is changed, changed because we are look- 
ing at it through opened eyes. What strange alter- 
ations there are in its values, how much more beau- 
tiful it seems! Spiritual people lose the world? 
No; they are the only people who can effectively 
use it. 

And this change in us which is fundamentally 
the realisation of the life of Christ in us, the pos- 
session of the Word of Christ, and the power to 
estimate the world and life in terms of his teach- 
ing, makes itself evident to those about us. They 
may regard us with indifference, they may regard 
us with awe, they may regard us with disgust, but 
in any case they recognise the difference. That is 
so much gain ; for the difference between the world 
and the Church, between the Christian and the non- 
Christian, is essential, and if it exists, must be rec- 
ognised. 



440 MEDITATIONS ON THE APOSTLES* CREED 

May we not say that the power with which the 
Church, and therefore we, the members of the 
Church, bear witness to its supernatural character 
as the Body of Christ, is proportioned to mani- 
fested ability to do without the world, ability to 
live by supernatural motives and to devote itself to 
supernatural ends? Is it not here that its descent 
into the field of competition with purely human or- 
ganisations, where it necessarily adopts business 
methods, and values efficiency and success before 
all else, implies forgetfulness of its own essential 
nature? There is only one success possible to the 
Church, success in manifesting Christ : there is only 
one form of effectiveness open to it, effectiveness 
in the production of sanctity. And in these things 
it has no competitors. It goes by a lonely road, 
neglected, if not scorned, by all worldly men. Men 
praise the Church and congratulate it on keeping 
up with the times when it shows signs of abandon- 
ing its supreme vocation, that it may become a 
philanthropic and benevolent society. But in such 
cases it witnesses to what ? To the existence among 
men of a certain desire to improve the world which 
it sets itself to foster and develop, but which it has 
rendered itself as powerless to effect as any of the 
myriad benevolent societies of which the centuries 
have seen the birth and death. It has, perhaps, em- 
phasised itself as sympathetic, but in doing so it 



THE HOLY CATHOLIC CHURCH 441 

has eliminated from its action the very factor that 
lends sympathy power. It is sympathetic with the 
well-meaning but helpless sympathy of those Apos- 
tles who, at the mountain foot, tried to cast the 
devil from the idiot child; but it is only when the 
Church, mindful of its supernatural character, has 
passed through the discipline of prayer and fasting, 
and comes from the Mount where it has had con- 
verse with the Father, that it can cast out any devils 
at all. 

And this is not to forget that the Church contains 
men in all stages of spiritual development and is 
concerned with the betterment of their lives in the 
place where they now are. It is not to forget that 
the Church is, by one side of it, the brotherhood of 
them that believe. It is not to forget that the mu- 
tual offices implied in the notion of brotherhood 
include kindliness and helpfulness and charity. 
Rather, it is to assert that, just because these quali- 
ties are indispensable elements in its ideal, it must 
insist that, in its understanding of them, they can 
only be attained by men who conceive of life as 
fundamentally spiritual. The Church occupies it- 
self with ministries for the improvement of human 
society as a part of its general mission of making 
men divine. It is no ambition of the Church to 
make men more comfortable, save as their comfort 
results from their spiritual improvement or minis- 



44* MEDITATIONS ON THE APOSTLES' CREED 

ters to it. It is anxious about poverty, not because 
poverty makes men uncomfortable, but because 
poverty implies the enslavement of man to man, 
and puts those who are poor in conditions of 
degradation which render it almost impossible that 
spiritual ideals of life should have sway, or even be 
intelligible. It objects to the present organisation 
of society because it is unbrotherly, producing sep- 
aration and enmity where there should be love and 
joy and peace. The Church declines to stop, where 
the humanitarian ideal stops, with the ideal of jus- 
tice; it holds to a broader ideal, the ideal of holi- 
ness, the manifestation of the life of Christ in the 
life of his members. 

No greater calamity can befall us, as Church or 
as individuals, than to lose sight of this ideal — 
holiness. Our woes have their root in this, that we 
have so largely lost sight of it. It may seem more 
practical to approach the problems of a divided 
Christendom, or a corrupt society, or of an ill- 
working industrial order, from some other point of 
view ; but it is not. The most practical thing for a 
human being is to subject his will to God's will, and 
to live his life in accord with that will. "In his will 
is our peace," in whatever sense you may under- 
stand peace, religious, social, industrial; and there 
is no peace elsewhere, or otherwise founded. 
"There is no peace, saith my God, to the wicked." 



THE TWENTY-FIRST MEDITATION 



THE 
TWENTY-FIRST MEDITATION 

THE COMMUNION OF SAINTS 

Let us listen to the Word of God — 

fSAW under the altar the souls of them that 
were slain for the word of God, and for the 
testimony which they held: And they cried 
with a loud voice, saying, How long, O Lord, holy 
and true, dost thou not judge and avenge our blood 
on them that dwell on the earth ? And white robes 
were given unto every one of them; and it was 
said unto them, that they should rest yet for a 
little season, until their fellow-servants also and 
their brethren, that should be killed as they were, 
should be fulfilled. 

445 



446 MEDITATIONS ON THE APOSTLES' CREED 

Let us picture to ourselves — 

These souls, waiting for the fulfilment of God's 
promises to them. We seem to hear them crying 
out of their weariness and distress for the coming 
of deliverance. They had suffered much in their 
lives on the earth because of their fidelity to God. 
In the cities where they had dwelt they had seen 
men living lives of riotous pleasure, and they had 
restrained themselves because of the ideal of life 
they had received from their Master. They had 
seen other members of the Christian community 
falling back to the world, unable any longer to en- 
dure the sacrifices that were the part of those who 
bore the cross. But they had held on to the end — 
"for the name of God, and for the testimony." And 
now that they have passed beyond the suffering of 
earth, they find that their full joy is withheld, 
awaiting the perfecting of their brethren. What 
pathos there is in that long cry that comes forth 
from the altar and fills the courts of heaven ! "How 
long, O Lord, holy and true?" We seem, as we 
listen, to hear it rise and swell, and then die into 
silence. It is not the voice of complaint, but the 
voice of longing ; they are so near the fulfilment of 
what they had lived and died to attain! But the 
message to them is that they have not lived or died 
for themselves, but they lived and died in and for 
the Body of which they are members; their lives 



THE COMMUNION OF SAINTS 447 

are still wrapped up in the life of the Body, and 
their full joy must await the perfecting, not of 
themselves, but of the Body. 

Consider, first — 

The far-reaching meaning of those words of St. 
Paul : "None of us liveth to himself, and no man 
dieth to himself." Just because the Church is the 
Body of Christ, and we members one of another, 
our life at any moment is conditioned by the lives 
of others. It is not possible to consider our own 
desires, our own needs, our own rewards, in isola- 
tion. They have to be considered in their relation 
to the life of the Body. We cannot rightly be in- 
terested in our own spiritual growth, as a thing 
apart; if it is a healthy growth it is the growth of 
a member of the Body, affecting the life of the 
whole. That is the lesson taught these waiting 
souls — that they are not, because of their fidelity 
unto death, detached from the life and obligation of 
the Body of Christ ; they still have their part in it, 
they are still members of it, their state is still con- 
ditioned by the state of their fellow-servants that 
are suffering on the earth. It is well for us to pon- 
der the meaning of this truth, that earth and 
heaven, this world and the next, are not isolated 
states of being, but that they are knit together in 
the unity of the Body of Christ. Whatever the 



44 8 MEDITATIONS ON THE APOSTLES' CREED 

state of being in which any member of that Body 
may live, he is still in a vital relation to the whole 
Body and to every member of it ; the law still holds, 
that if one member suffer, the other members suf- 
fer with it; and if one rejoice, the others rejoice 
with it. There is no such separation between 
heaven and earth as we are wont to imagine ; rather 
there is the closest interdependence. We have so 
much difficulty in making anything practical out 
of the truth of the Communion of Saints because 
we forget our interdependence and insist in looking 
at our own lives as separate entities, related to God, 
no doubt, but only in some fictitious or imaginative 
way, related to the whole life of the Church. A 
study of those glimpses that we are suffered to 
have of the "other world" shows that that world is 
ever eagerly interested and deeply concerned in the 
affairs of our "world" ; that its powers are ever 
exerted in sympathetic helpfulness toward us. 

Consider, second — 

That beacuse the Church as a whole, and not the 
heavenly part of it, is the Communion of Saints, 
its total success in responding to the will of its 
Head, and manifesting his life, is conditioned upon 
our success in response and manifestation. The 
Church moves forward as a whole ; the lagging ad- 
vance of one member delays the advance of the 



THE COMMUNION OF SAINTS 449 

whole Body. The impetuous onrush of the saints 
is balanced and, in measure, nullified, by the linger- 
ing advance of the bulk of the membership of the 
Church. We need to examine ourselves as to this 
fact : — How far is the advance of the Church being 
hindered by me? Am I an enthusiastic member of 
the Body, helping by my zeal and self-sacrificing 
efforts, by the consecration in unselfish service of 
all my powers, the completion of the ideal of the 
Kingdom of God? Or are there souls under the 
altar to-day crying out, "How long, O Lord, holy 
and true?" only to receive the answer, "You must 
wait, as I must wait, till such and such souls are 
disciplined to take their full part in the work of 
my kingdom." It seems a small thing, the thing 
that we individually are given to do, but it is a part 
of a great whole, and the whole is not complete till 
each part is completed. No man can tell the pre- 
cise value of his contribution to the work of God's 
Kingdom, no man can say how valuable he is in 
the communion of saints; but he has no right to 
assume that he is valueless and the work will go on 
as well without as with his contribution. Is it not 
true that there are souls depending in some meas- 
ure on all of us, depending on our example and 
word for the perfecting of some quality in which 
they are lacking — being, perhaps, without percep- 
tion of that quality, because it was our vocation in 



45° MEDITATIONS ON THE APOSTLES' CREED 

life to show it, and we have failed? A certain part 
of a machine may be very small, but it may also be 
very vital ; and the work assigned to any individual 
in the Kingdom of God is not to be estimated in 
terms of human values. We are to assume that our 
place in the kingdom is of vast importance, and fill 
it with a sense of immense responsibility to God 
and to our fellows. 

Let us, then, pray — 

For a fuller understanding of the meaning of the 
Communion of Saints ; for a deeper appreciation of 
our place in that communion and of our responsi- 
bilities to it. Let us understand that we must be 
numbered with the saints now, if we will be num- 
bered with them in glory everlasting. 

O Almighty God, who hast knit together thine 
elect in one communion and fellowship, in the mys- 
tical body of thy Son Christ our Lord; Grant us 
grace so to follow thy blessed saints in all virtuous 
and godly living, that we may come to those un- 
speakable joys which thou hast prepared for those 
who unfeignedly love thee; through Jesus Christ 
our Lord. 

The Communion of Saints! Our thought goes 
out instinctively to the "other world" where "saints 
are clothed in spotless white, and evening shadows 



THE COMMUNION OF SAINTS 45 1 

never fall"; we think of the "saints in light" en- 
tranced by the splendour of the Beatific Vision ; we 
think of the future of the Christian as a life that 
moves onward to the time when it shall enter this 
communion and have its perfect consummation and 
bliss in God's eternal and everlasting glory. Into 
this Communion of Saints we shall enter some 
time if God will. 

It is, no doubt, needless to say that this is a very 
partial way of looking at the Communion of Saints. 
The Communion of Saints is not a future fact, nor 
does it belong to a future world. It is one of those 
springing and growing facts that have their origin 
here, and reveal their meaning here, but attain 
their full development elsewhere. The Communion 
of Saints is only another way of looking at the 
Holy Catholic Church. The content of the two is 
the same; because we belong to the Holy Catholic 
Church we are of the Communion of Saints. It is 
simply that when we are thinking of the Communion 
of Saints we are thinking of the members of the 
Body of Christ, less as they are related to him, 
their Head, than as, through their indwelling in 
him, they are related to one another and are active 
toward one another. It is the internal activities of 
the Body of Christ, if one may venture the expres- 
sion, that we have in mind when we think of the 
Communion of Saints. It is an intensely practical 



45 2 MEDITATIONS ON THE APOSTLES' CREED 

doctrine that we have to do with. It seems to me 
that our religion would acquire much of light and 
joy if it stressed more the truths that are embodied 
in this article of the Creed. Let us see if we can 
draw out some of them. 

If we think of the Church merely as an institu- 
tion in the world, an institution with a long history, 
widespread and of many activities, we understand 
that its fortunes are the outcome of the manifold 
activities of multitudes of whom we have no knowl- 
edge. There is an heritage brought down from the 
past which contains not only the results of the 
actions of men long dead, but also contains their 
spirit Our charitable works to-day are not simply 
the successors of the works of the past, copies of 
them in terms of modern architecture and sanita- 
tion, but they have a certain spirit in dealing with 
their problems, which is the spirit of Christ, ulti- 
mately no doubt, but which also is fragrant with the 
memory of the great saints who have given them- 
selves to the like work. There ligers something of 
the Christ-like touch of St. Francis, the touch that 
eased the pains of lepers as it so lovingly washed 
their sores, in our ministry in hospitals; there is 
something of the mind of St. Vincent in our deal- 
ing with orphans ; there is the wide charity of How- 
ard in our work for prisoners. And when we turn 
our minds from history and consider that St. Fran- 



THE COMMUNION OF SAINTS 453 

cis and St. Vincent and Howard still live and are 
still members of the Kingdom of God, we are sure, 
are we not, that their interest still lives in the works 
that meant so much to them while they were on 
earth? We cannot imagine that they have less in- 
terest now than they had then; we cannot imagine 
them so fascinated with the joys of heaven as ta 
have lost interest in earth. In that case, we should 
think of heaven with dread, rather than with joy 
and hope. If heaven means an utter break of rela- 
tions, then those who regard it with indifference 
are justified. 

We can carry the same line of thought into any 
institution, any parish, any family. The building 
and the shaping and the training were effected by 
the embodiment in them of something of the men 
and women who were concerned with them. Their 
mind, their spirit, their love, went into them : and 
they remain. The founders and trainers are still 
attached to what they laboured for and loved. 
Again, it is impossible to think of death as involv- 
ing detachment ; for what was attached was spirit 
not body — the essential human being, not some 
separable accident of him. 

As we carry this line of thought out to the life 
of the Church we feel that it is strengthened by the 
very nature of the Church. For the member of the 
Church has not the loose relation to it that the 



454 MEDITATIONS ON THE APOSTLES' CREED 

founder has to an institution, but his relation is or- 
ganic. He is a member of the Body and remains a 
member of it wherever he may be. His life and 
action, therefore, affect the life and action of all 
other members because they affect the Body of 
which both are parts. His influence on the for- 
tunes of the Church is not the passive persistence 
of an ideal to which he devoted himself and which 
he still loves; it is the active influence of one who 
is still energetic in the life of the Body. You may 
transfer a man from one department of the govern- 
ment to another, and in doing so you change the 
point of application of his energy; but you do not 
change the fact that he is still energetic, still influ- 
ential in the fortunes of his country. You may re- 
move the Christian from this life, and from the 
special set of problems he was here dealing with; 
but you do not remove him from the Kingdom of 
God, and you do not lessen, rather you heighten, 
his spiritual effectiveness in the kingdom. We be- 
lieve that the saint in heaven is a more effective 
member of the Body of Christ than he was on 
earth; and we do not believe that his effectiveness 
is effectiveness for heaven only, but that he is 
effective for earth also. If this be not so, I do not 
see that the Communion of Saints, as between the 
saints on earth and those in heaven, has much of 
meaning or importance to us here and now. 



THE COMMUNION OF SAINTS 455 

No doubt we find a certain difficulty in stating 
for ourselves just how this continual influence of 
the saint is exerted; but I do not know that the 
difficulty is enhanced if we think of him as acting in 
another part of the Body above what it is if we 
think of him as acting under our eyes. What is 
the influence of sanctity in any case? It is super- 
ficial to say that it is the influence of an example, 
because it is what is back of the example that we 
are trying to get at. It is the influence of a person- 
ality : and the best conception of a personality that 
I am able to form is that it is a centre and source 
of power. We know what we mean when we speak 
of a powerful personality ; we know that we do not 
mean certain things said and done, but that back 
of the things said and done there is a certain some- 
thing which is original with the man and gives his 
sayings and doings potency, carrying-power, drive. 
Another man may do and say the same things and 
the result is absolutely different. It is only those 
who suppose that we are turned into some sort of 
harp-playing nonenities in heaven who can suppose 
that the power of spiritual personality will be lost 
to the Kingdom of God when a man dies. Rather, 
one would suppose it raised to a higher potency; 
that it would become more effective and on a 
broader scale. "Yes : but more effective in heaven/' 
you say. No: more effective in the Kingdom of 



45 6 MEDITATIONS ON THE APOSTLES' CREED 

God, in the Body of Christ; and more effective in 
relation to the saints' interests. And why think of 
the saints' interests as utterly changed? Why not 
assume that among other and different interests, the 
old interests will abide ? 

One, perhaps the chief, mode of the saint's ac- 
tivity while he was on earth was prayer. Then we 
valued his prayers ; we asked that our names might 
be included among his intercessions. If we had any 
need, any work to do, any spiritual battle to fight, 
we went to him; we asked him to take our need 
with him when he went into his secret place to be 
with God ; if he were a priest, we asked him to bear 
it upon his heart when he went into the holy place 
to make intercession for the people. We relied 
upon those prayers ; we found that again and again 
God answered them. If we knew him intimately 
we knew how much he himself relied on prayer. 
We saw the tension of his face as he went to the 
altar; we saw his joy as he came away from the 
meeting with his Master. We knew that he never 
undertook anything, even things of slight import- 
ance, the talking with a child, the call he had to 
make, the letter he had to write, without the mo- 
mentary retirement of his soul to be alone with 
God. Perhaps as he talked with us we could see 
the running commentary of prayer that accompa- 
nied the conversation. Well, now he lives in the 



THE COMMUNION OF SAINTS 457 

nearer presence of God, he enjoys a closer com- 
munion with his Saviour : are we to assume either 
that he has lost interest in us, or that his prayers 
are of less avail ?■ Shall we not rather hold to this 
thought, that he still bears our needs and our names 
into the Inner Presence, where the prayers of the 
righteous avail much ? 

We on our side, if we have ever valued inter- 
course and close personal relations with those who 
are eminent in spiritual character, shall still value 
it. We shall not easily consent that such men and 
women of powerful spirituality as we have known 
shall become mere memories. To recall such with 
regretful tears seems to me to show small belief in 
the Kingdom of God as a unity in which we par- 
ticipate. We shall rather delight to commune in 
prayer with those whose prayers we have felt it 
our privilege to share. I do not know any reason 
why I should not ask the prayers of any friend 
here; and I do not know of any reason why I 
should cease to do so when the friend is removed 
elsewhere in the Kingdom of God. I, who am con- 
stantly asking the prayers of sinners here on earth, 
do not see why I should hestiate to ask the prayers 
of the saints of God. Nor do I hesitate. 

I believe in the Communion of Saints. I think 
that I have sufficiently discussed elsewhere the na- 
ture of holiness to justify me in passing over that 



45 8 MEDITATIONS ON THE APOSTLES' CREED 

phase of the subject now. But I may perhaps em- 
phasise once more the fact that this Communion 
that we believe in is shared in by all who are in a 
state of grace, and that the privileges that accrue 
to us from it imply corresponding obligations. In 
order to take our place properly in any organiza- 
tion, still more rightly to perform our function in 
an organism such as the Body of Christ, there is 
need on our part of a certain preparation, and that 
preparation here takes the form of a certain disci- 
pline of the spiritual nature. The saint is not a 
person of good intentions or of good habits, but is 
a special creation of divine grace. In germ, in 
potentiality, he is simply the baptised person; in 
actuality, he is a person who has passed through 
rigorous training, the resultant of many spiritual 
experiences. Many graces have been granted him 
and he has responded by many actions of the will. 
The saint, I should say, is a strictly artificial pro- 
duct — the work of the divine artist ; but, like all 
work of the highest artistry, bearing the marks of 
individuality in execution. He is the work of the 
artist, yet a work wrought in material that is re- 
sponsive after its own nature. The Divine Gar- 
dener makes each tree in his garden to bring forth 
fruit, but it is fruit after its own kind. 

I stood on a June afternoon in a place of won- 
drous beauty — a rose garden. It lay upon a hill- 



THE COMMUNION OF SAINTS 459 

side, and, westward, one looked out over a valley 
to the tree-clothed hills beyond, already darkening 
as the sun went down. Down in the ravine at my 
feet a brook purled, rilling the air with music. On 
the other sides the garden was enclosed with trel- 
lises covered with pink and white roses — masses of 
gorgeous bloom. At the foot of the trellises long 
lines of white lillies tossed a pungent perfume in 
the air. In narrow bed after narrow bed rows of 
splendid roses lifted their heads to the sun — deli- 
cate buds of saffron, huge balls of pink and white 
and crimson. Upon them had been spent all the 
skill of the experimenter, all the care of the gar- 
dener, all the resources of the millionaire. In a 
sense, these flowers were as artificial as the flowers 
that one sees in milliners' windows — they were 
works of art, the creations of the skill of man. But 
they were not creations out of nothing; they were 
modifications of the original rose. And thus in the 
garden of the Church of God the saints stand re- 
splendent, rank upon rank; and they are the con- 
summate products of God's grace ; but also they are 
the modifications of our poor nature, and full of 
the promise of what we may become. 

Because there is a Communion of Saints there is 
a co-operation of saints. The communion is not so 
much an achieved fact as a fact that is approaching 
fulfilment. Every member of the communion is 



460 MEDITATIONS ON THE APOSTLES' CREED 

making individual contributions to the final result. 
The House eternal in the heavens, the City that 
hath foundations, is rising slowly but surely 
through the ages as the living stones are built in 
without the sound of axes and hammers, each one 
falling into the place designed for it by the Divine 
Architect. But it slips into and occupies its place 
so nicely, because somewhere there has been the 
work of the axe and the hammer of the skilled 
workman. When the temple rose silently on Mount 
Sion, it could rise silently because the noisy work 
had been done elsewhere. Far off in the forest of 
the Lebanon there had been the ring of axes and 
the crash of falling cedars as the workmen of 
Hiram prepared the beams and the pillars for the 
house. By the clay beds of the Jordan valley there 
had been the sound of many workmen as the moulds 
were made and the brazen instruments were cast. 
Far down under the city the masons hewed and 
smoothed the rough stones that built the founda- 
tions of the dwelling-place of God. In many an 
house in Israel the women sang as they spun the 
blue and purple and fine linen for the curtains of 
the temple of their God. It was only the last stage 
that had the silence of perfect work. So it is in 
our spiritual building; there is much hard and 
weary labour of the workers; many a habit to be 
hewn smooth, many a rough surface of natural 



THE COMMUNION OF SAINTS 46 1 

imperfection to be polished, many a temper to be 
melted in the fires of affliction and recast to be an 
ornament for the house. The rough places have to 
be made plain and the valleys filled before the King 
can come along the highway. We faint and grow 
weary sometimes at the obstinacy of the material 
that has to be dealt with. We despair at moments 
at the weakness of the flesh and the uncertainty of 
the will. But take courage and remember that we 
are engaged on no ephemeral work, but that the 
character that we are fashioning is to take its place 
among the saints in the kingdom of the future, 
there to abide eternally in the glory of his presence, 
there to experience eternally the passion of his love. 
We need to bear in mind that the member of the 
Communion does not exist for himself but for God, 
the Kingdom, his fellows. The sanctity that he 
acquires through union with his Risen Head is a 
dynamic that expends itself in the interests of the 
Body. Sanctity is an impulsive force. Even in the 
extreme example of the hermit saints, who find few 
admirers to-day, it can hardly be contended that the 
reproach of fruitlessness is well aimed at them. 
Apart from the power of a life of prayer, a power 
that any Christian must take into account in an at- 
tempt to give any complete analysis of them, they 
were by their very protest against the world and 
their demonstrated power to dispense with it, cen- 



462 MEDITATIONS ON THE APOSTLES' CREED 

tres of influence on behalf of a spiritual interpreta- 
tion of life. We may not need that particular form 
of protest at present, but that we need the protest 
in no form cannot be maintained. It is a necessary 
function of the saint to present that protest in some 
incontrovertible form; to bring home to the world, 
not only the beauty of holiness, but its strength and 
sanity under present conditions. There is no les- 
son that the young men and women of New York 
need more to have brought home to them than the 
possibility of living simply and cleanly in the midst 
of the horrible corruption of which they are the 
daily spectators. The spectacle of the corrupting 
power of the desire for money, of the morally de- 
structive power of the lust for pleasure, dulls the 
moral and spiritual sense of those who are in con- 
stant contact with it. Insensibly they are drawn to 
ideals that are spiritually deadening. Almost with- 
out noticing the changes that are taking place in 
them, they range themselves on the side of evil. 
And yet there are multitudes that have not gone so 
far as to be without perception of the beauty of 
holiness. What they need to hold and rescue them 
is the evidence of this beauty in the lives of men 
and women whom they know ; to see those whose 
place in life opens to them all doors of self-indulg- 
ence, yet live as though those doors did not exist: 
who live quiet lives of great devotion, expending 



THE COMMUNION OF SAINTS 463 

the full powers of their manhood and womanhood 
in prayer and work for the Kingdom of God. Lives 
of great restraint, directed by the mind of the 
Spirit, denying themselves in the interests of ideal 
ends, are lives of great evidential power. They are 
lives that encourage and strengthen those who are 
beginning to say, Who will show us any good? 
There are very few human beings who have the 
inborn power to stand alone. We most of us feel 
the pull of the kind of life that surrounds us. We 
feel that the influences of the Powers of the King- 
dom of Darkness dog our steps. But also, thank 
God, we are open to better influences, and we 
should willingly be led to respond to the influence 
of the Holy Spirit, if that influence were less a 
theory preached from pulpits, and more obviously 
an influence dominant in the lives of men and 
women whom we have been taught to look upon 
as Christian. Hence the tremendous responsibility 
of those who have recognised the call to be saints, 
to be so evidentially, showing to the world lives in 
which the power is the power of the Living Christ. 
The "hidden saint" has his virtue and his value, 
but there is always the need of the saint whose 
light shines plainly and unmistakably before men, 
guiding them to the Father. 

One of the fruits of the Spirit, and therefore one 
of the attributes of sanctity, is joy. In the Com- 



464 MEDITATIONS ON THE APOSTLES' CREED 

munion of Saints there is already a participation 
in the joy of the Lord. That joy is the joy of 
achievement, in being admitted to share in the vic- 
torious work of the Lord. There is deep and vivid 
joy in the accomplishment of any great work. What 
more joyous than to feel ourselves swept into the 
full tide of some great undertaking, to feel that we 
have a part, no matter how small, in the successful 
accomplishment of something that we say to our- 
selves is worth while ? And what more worth while 
than the work of God's kingdom in which we are 
associated with the angels and saints and God him- 
self? There are tasks that seem mere drudgery, 
but we forget their insignificance and common- 
placeness when we can see that they do not end in 
themselves, but are items in a great whole with 
which, through them, we have become associated. 
Most work is tiresome and savourless unless we 
can manage in some way to lift it above itself. 
Most women shrink from the thought of a Sister's 
work, and question whether it is not found to be 
narrow and unhappy, with its endless round of 
offices said, and visits made and received, its iso- 
lation from all that is "entertaining." And no 
doubt it would be found deadening to all strength 
and all spring of life if it began and ended in it- 
self — if it were a "work" and not a "vocation." 
But it neither begins nor ends in itself; it is an 



THE COMMUNION OF SAINTS 465 

element in a great whole — the work of the Kingdom 
of God. It gets its own peculiar joys from associa- 
tion with the saints and the saints' Master, who 
found that the supreme joy that life brought them 
was to lay down their life for the brethren. Do 
you imagine that those who from tenements and 
palaces, from crowded boarding-houses and luxuri- 
ous apartments, sweep out in the early evening 
through Times Square, seeking to lose themselves 
for a few hours in excitement, guilty or other, know 
any joy so vivid, so keen, so worth while, as those 
who with rigorous self-discipline offer themselves 
and all their powers and possessions to the service 
of their brothers in the Catholic Church, which is 
the Communion of Saints ? No : you do not believe 
that. You know that the joy of a man's life con- 
sistent not in the abundance of the things he can 
make his own, but in the fulness of his self-offering 
to his Master and brothers. You know that. Have 
you the spiritual strength to act upon it? 

"Ye are come," writes the author of the Epistle 
to the Hebrews, "unto Mount Sion, and unto the 
City of the Living God, the heavenly Jerusalem, 
and to an innumerable company of angels, to the 
General Assembly and Church of the firstborn, 
which are written in heaven, and to God the Judge 
of all, and to the spirits of just men made perfect, 
and to Jesus." In our moments of loneliness and 



466 MEDITATIONS ON THE APOSTLES' CREED 

discontent, those moments that come at times to us 
all to kill the joy and vigour of our activity, how 
heartening are these words. With what renewed 
vigour we take up the burden that has now lost its 
weight ; how gladly we press forward. For we go 
under watchful eyes. Angels — they are watching, 
and not unsympathetically. Saints — they are stoop- 
ing to see how their successors run the race, pray- 
ing that our strength may not fail. Jesus — he too 
is at hand with the cheer of his presence. Xo : we 
cannot fail. We can mount up on wings as eagles, 
we can run and not be weary, we can walk and 
faint not. 



THE TWENTY-SECOND MEDITATION 



THE 
TWENTY-SECOND MEDITATION 

THE FORGIVENESS OF SINS 

Let us listen to the zvords of Nathan — 



B 



ND Nathan said unto David, Thou art the 
Man. 



Let us picture — 

This scene in the royal palace where the prophet 
is standing before the king telling his story of the 
poor man's lamb. We can imagine something of 
the courage that was the prophet's as he went in to 
the king with his message of condemnation ; he was 
taking his life in his hands that morning when God 
sent him to unveil the eyes of David that he might 
469 



47° MEDITATIONS ON THE APOSTLES' CREED 

see himself. We seem to see the intense eyes of 
the prophet fixed on David as the story goes on 
unfolding, waiting for some sign of comprehension 
of the inner meaning of the tale to show itself in 
the king's face. But what he sees there is just in- 
terest in the story — interest passing into anger as 
the tale goes on, till the wrath of the king boils over 
and he condemns most sternly the heartless rich 
man. We see David rising from his couch, right- 
eously indignant, feeling the responsibility of his 
kingship to see that wrong is righted, and iniquity 
punished. One fancies Nathan rather perplexed 
that his thinly disguised allegory is not compre- 
hended, and that in the end he has to speak plainly. 
But he does not hesitate : the words fall with crush- 
ing force — "Thou art the man." We see the face of 
the king blanch, and his whole form shrivel up, as 
the prophet goes on in words that fall like the sen- 
tence of death itself, slowly rehearsing the items of 
the indictment, till they culminate in the unfolding 
of the boundless extent of the divine mercy and 
goodness : — "and if that had been too little, I would 
moreover have given unto thee such and such 
things." That is what touches the quick of the con- 
science when a man comes to himself — the endless 
goodness of God, the gifts that he is ready to shake 
into our laps without stinting, and which we sacri- 
ficed and scorned from some passing self-gratifica- 



THE FORGIVENESS OF SINS 47 1 

tion. What must have been the depths of the self- 
loathing of David as the horror of his case swept 
over him. I am indeed this man, this man whom I 
have judged too vile to be suffered longer on the 
earth. 

Consider, first — 

That David was not a thoroughly corrupt man — 
he was a good man gone wrong through the sweep 
of a momentary passion. One fancies that to his 
contemporaries his action would have seemed about 
what might be expected in a king. We are judging 
him by the standard that Nathan brought to bear on 
him — the standard that was involved in his relation 
to God. Because of God's gifts, because of his 
knowledge that he had been chosen to be king over 
Israel, to represent to Israel the mind and purpose 
of God, he was bound to live by the light of God's 
revelation. That he knew that appears from his 
failure to plead any excuse, to make any defence. 
What excuses he had been making to himself we do 
not know; but whatever they may have been they 
do not survive the prophet's display of the nature 
of his act. His conscience responds to the indict- 
ment of Nathan instantly — "I have sinned against 
the Lord." It is the value of a religious training 
that under all the wayward experiences of sin the 
educated conscience survives. Deceive and harden 



47 2 MEDITATIONS ON THE APOSTLES' CREED 

ourselves as we will, there is the uneasy sense that 
we are guilty, and there will come the day when 
some prophet's word will reach us, and we shall see 
ourselves clearly. It may be, certainly, that when 
that day comes we are too wedded to our sin to 
detach ourselves from it, too weakened in will to 
even wish for freedom ; but see we shall, even if in 
the act of seeing we choose sin once more. But in 
David the conscience was not hardened, and to see 
himself was to abhor himself. All the evil past rose 
up before him, recounting itself step by step from 
that moment when the sight of his eyes kindled the 
lust of his flesh, through self-indulgence to the ter- 
ror of threatened discovery, on to black treachery 
and murder. He had not intended that in the be- 
ginning, but one sin had forced him on to another 
sin, and now, in his moment of self-detection he 
sees the corpse of Uriah lying bloody before his 
eyes. And yet it is not the wronged Uriah that is 
at the bottom of his anguish, but the wronged God. 
It is not regret that he feels, but repentance — I 
have sinned against the Lord. 

Consider, second — 

That all true repentance must bring us face to 
face with that fact — I have sinned against the Lord. 
Under all other relations is our relation to our 
Father in heaven; back of all other responsibilities 



THE FORGIVENESS OF SINS 473 

is our responsibility to his will. Apart from recog- 
nition of that, we may have regret, remorse, even 
the determination to reform, but we cannot have 
repentance. That is based on the love of God and 
is a manifestation of a desire to put ourselves right 
with that love. Other relations may have to be re- 
stored in the course of our repentance, other wrongs 
may have to be righted, and ill-deeds made good as 
far as is in our power ; but the dealing of the soul 
with God is the primary thing, because the essence 
of sin is that it is rebellion from the will of God 
and a wound to his love. The soul lies stricken and 
desolate when it has cast itself out from the divine 
presence ; it is a fugitive and a wanderer in the earth 
until that presence is restored. Forgiveness is not 
the rectification of wrong done, because the essential 
wrong that we have done cannot be rectified by our- 
selves. We can only plead with God that we be 
restored to his favour, that the grace of pardon be 
shed abroad in us abundantly. Consider, whether 
you approach your own sins from this point of 
view. Is that which instinctively occurs to you, 
I have sinned against the Lord ? Or do you try to 
estimate the evil of sin by the current standards of 
judgment that prevail among your neighbours, 
counting it less or greater as it is excused or con- 
demned in the circle in which you move? Many 
men deliberately turn away from God's standard 



474 MEDITATIONS ON THE APOSTLES' CREED 

and substitute for it the standard of worldly society. 
Nowhere is the influence of the world more dis- 
astrous than in the power that it exercises over 
moral standards. If only we can sin in respectable 
company, the sting of sin seems to be withdrawn. 
But it made no difference in the guilt of David's 
sin that all other kings commonly practised it; and 
David knew that it made no difference — that reveals 
the inner soundness of his character. He knew that 
he had sinned against the Lord. 

Let us, then, pray — 

For deeper appreciation of the essential nature of 
sin; let us pray that we may ever try to see our 
conduct through the eyes of God ; pray to be deliv- 
ered from spiritual blindness, and brought to true 
repentance. 

Grant, we beseech thee, merciful Lord, to thy 
faithful people pardon and peace; that they may 
be cleansed from all their sins, and serve thee with 
a quiet mind ; through Jesus Christ, our Lord. 

One of the things that until these last days hu- 
manity has been surest of is its sinfulness. It em- 
bodied this conviction in its religious systems, often 
absurd, often abhorrent in form, but the more 
absurd or abhorrent the form, the clearer the testi- 
mony to the conviction of sin. What we call nat- 



THE FORGIVENESS OF SINS 475 

ural religions are valuable in this regard, that they 
embody the spontaneous working of man's thought 
on the problems of life and destiny with which he 
feels himself confronted. They tell us, not only of 
this sense of sin, but also of man's despair to escape 
from sin otherwise than by an act of the unseen 
power that he had offended. Man knows that he 
has sinned, he knows that he needs forgiveness, he 
knows that he cannot forgive himself. That is 
what drives man to all the varied and often terrible 
attempts at propitiation which he has embodied in 
his religions. 

We are as certain of our sinfulness as the men 
who embodied their instincts in the natural reli- 
gions, and therefore there is no better news in all 
the good news proclaimed by our Lord than that 
which is summed up in this article of the Creed, 
I believe in the forgiveness of sins. That judgment 
upon our own conduct that we call conscience is 
justified, and more than justified, by the definition 
of man's state and destiny that is found in the 
pages of Revelation. The notion of sin is cleared 
from its obscurity, but so cleared it is only the more 
fearful. The nature of the offence against God 
that is involved in sin and makes it sinful, is cleared, 
too, but only that it may appear worse than we 
thought. What drives deepest into our souls and 
fills them with self-abhorrence, is not that we have 



476 MEDITATIONS ON THE APOSTLES' CREED 

discovered what we had expected, that our conduct 
had aroused the anger of God, but that we have 
discovered what we did not at all expect, that we 
have wounded the love of God. When revelation 
draws aside the veil, what we behold is not an in- 
censed Deity rising in wrath from his throne to take 
vengeance upon us, but a God with a broken heart 
hanging upon a cross where we have nailed him. 
The words that we hear when our ears are opened 
to the voice of God are not reproaches and cries for 
vengeance ; but the words of one who pursues that 
he may rescue. "God so loved the world that he 
gave his only begotten Son, to the end that all that 
believe in him should not perish, but have everlast- 
ing life." "Christ Jesus came into the world to save 
sinners." 

That is, the attitude of God that is made known 
to men by revelation, came to them as a surprise. 
They had not made any mistake about sin; or, if 
they had, it was in the way of an underestimate of 
it ; but they made a mistake about God. They had 
thought him even such an one as themselves; they 
had conceived him, that is, in terms of their own 
nature. They knew how natural to them was anger 
against the sinner and the seeking vengeance for the 
wrong done, and they had attributed these feelings 
in a magnified form to God. Whereas it turned out 
that these feelings by which they had judged, and 



THE FORGIVENESS OF SINS 477 

which they had thought their best, were themselves 
sinful, the outcome of a depraved nature; and that 
they had not only misunderstood God, but them- 
selves. That, indeed, they could not get rightly to 
understand themselves until they knew something 
of God ; for to know man is to know him as he is in 
the divine ideal, as he shall be when he is restored 
and forgiven and endowed with the beauty of the 
indwelling life of God. 

It needs, then, all that earlier part of the Creed, 
the teaching about God and the work of God In- 
carnate, and the mission and work of the Holy 
Ghost, to prepare us to understand sin. This article 
of the Creed does not come in here by accident or 
as an afterthought, but it comes in where alone it 
can be understood, after those clauses which pre- 
pare us to see its meaning and possibility. We see 
sin now, not as the mechanical violation of a law 
or fixed rule dependent upon the arbitrary will of 
the law-giver, but we see it as the rebellion of the 
child who rejects the wise love of the Father. We 
see that its evil lies deeper than opposition to exter- 
nal decrees; that its essential evil is the deflection 
of man's nature from its highest good, the willing 
departure from the love that would guide and bless 
him. But man can understand this only when he 
understands Christ ; only when he has seen the seek- 
ing love of God becoming Incarnate that it may 



47** MEDITATIONS ON THE APOSTLES'' CREED 

seek and save the lost ; only when he learns that the 
work of God in dealing with the sinner is not ven- 
geance or punishment, but redemption and salva- 
tion. Man must see sin in the light of all God's 
dealings with it to understand it. 

And the more we ponder on this dealing of God 
with sin, the deeper will be our abhorrence of sin. 
The brighter the sun shines, the blacker the shadow 
we cast on the ground ; and the deeper our under- 
standing of the love of God in Christ, the blacker 
will appear any willing violation of that love. Those 
who see God clearest are those who are most 
haunted by the thought of their own sinfulness; 
those who have fullest experienced the wonder of 
the divine forgiveness, dread most the defiling 
touch of sin. We have but to read the story of a 
St. Paul or a St. Francis, and feel the sense of a 
real sinfulness that runs through their lives, to un- 
derstand this ; and to understand, too, that our own 
sense of sin is a most imperfect one, inasmuch as it 
produces in us no such conviction of our own un- 
worthiness as we see in them. We are deficient, we 
tell ourselves, in the sense of sinfulness ; but our real 
deficiency is a deficiency in the love of God. If we 
loved more, we should dread sin more. 

For that is the real defect of us, not that we are 
sinners, but that we are not lovers. Our penitence 
is defective because it is not the expression of love. 



THE FORGIVENESS OF SINS 479 

That is one of the deeper lessons that we may learn 
from the penitence of the saints. When we read 
the lives of the mediaeval saints, when we read, for 
example, such a book as "The Little Flowers of St. 
Francis," we are most of us, I fancy, repelled by the 
penitential side of the narrative, the hair shirts, the 
iron rings and plates, and so on. It seems very 
meaningless and quite contrary to all that we have 
been saying about love. But that would seem to be 
merely a surface appreciation of the facts, and a 
failure to read the mind of the saint. For we find 
that the penances themselves, strange modes of 
them as they seem to us, are the expressions of love 
and joy. The saint loves suffering; but he loves it 
because suffering was the mode of the Incarnate life 
of God. He suffered, that is what St. Francis 
grasps so firmly — he suffered for my sins, for the 
love of me. His appreciation of the work of our 
Lord as a work for him has a vividness that we fall 
far short of; and because his appreciation of the 
work of our Lord is so intensely personal, his re- 
sponse is intensely personal too. He wants to iden- 
tify himself with his suffering master and to pass 
through all his experiences. If the Lord Jesus suf- 
fered for sin, and he is united to Jesus, he too must 
suffer for sin. There is no thought here of supple- 
menting the atonement ; the thought is of identifying 
oneself with it. Identity with our Lord, which the 



4^0 MEDITATIONS ON THE APOSTLES' CREED 

saint seeks, will end in reproducing his experiences. 
If he was poor, let me be poor, the saint seems to 
say ; if he suffered, let me suffer. I cannot claim to 
be one with him and have an utterly different life 
and set of experiences. 

There is much here that we, in the beginning of 
the twentieth century, with our easy scorn of the 
forms of mediaeval thought, would do well to pon- 
der. But it would lead us too far afield to pursue 
the subject now. I have only wished to emphasise 
the truth that if we could escape sin the path is 
through penitential love, — penitence rests on love. 
We may cast the thought as we will in the forms of 
our own experience ; but love we must, if we really 
repent. 

And is not this also a truth that we need to em- 
phasise to-day, and which was made emphatic by 
the mediaeval penitent, that we need some proof to 
ourselves of the reality of our penitence? The 
heart is above all things deceitful, and it is very 
easy to imagine that we are penitent when there is 
small evidence of it. Of course you say at once that 
the evidence of repentance is the forsaking of the 
sin we repent of. Yes : no doubt. But is there not 
something deeper about the penitent than that? Is 
there not such a thing as a life of penitence? I 
mean an attitude toward life that results from our 
sinful condition. If I understand the great peni- 



THE FORGIVENESS OF SINS 48 1 

tents this is true ; they are not content with dealing 
with individual sins; they feel that within them is 
a sinful nature. I do not understand that they think 
that this exposes them to punishment as wilful sin 
does, but that it is rather present to them as a state 
of imperfect being. It does not destroy their sense 
of forgiveness or their joy in forgiveness ; but rather 
those very things demand of them an attitude of 
response which shows itself in such penitential dis- 
cipline as I have noted ; and also in what I want to 
note now, a life of service, a life of good works, as 
they would have expressed it. To put it otherwise, 
the life of the soul that is pardoned and at peace 
will be constantly expressive of that fact in joyful 
and holy activities, and the presence of these activi- 
ties is evidence to the soul itself of its state ; and if 
it is fruitless, it may very well doubt of its state. 

This is reverting to a religion of good works? 
Perhaps so : I am not anxious about the particular 
theological tag that may be attached to it. What I 
am anxious about is to bring out the truth, as I 
believe it to be, that a forgiven life must of neces- 
sity be a fruitful life, and that its fruitfulness will 
be a sign of its penitential love. It is not a question 
of "purchasing the favour of God" ; it is a question 
of expressing our love toward God, mingled with a 
sense, that seems to me inevitable, of our unworthi- 
ness and still imperfect state. I think that the mod- 



481 MEDITATIONS ON THE APOSTLES'' CREED 

ern world could very well stand a little more teach- 
ing as to the obligation and value of working for 
God, giving to God, directing all our activities to 
God, without the circumlocution of first seeing that 
what we do is socially valuable. I believe that there 
is a comprehensible truth to be extricated from the 
word merit, the truth that God loves the evidence 
of our love. 

Some one has said that the real punishment of 
sin is being a sinner. And although the forgiveness 
of sin is full and free, that punishment abides in a 
certain desire for sin, or at least, of things sinful. 
That is one of the most discouraging things that we 
have to deal with in the attempt for spiritual im- 
provement. I find that what really holds me back 
is, not attachment to this or that sin, but acquies- 
cence in an inadequate standard of spiritual living. 
It is only momentarily that one wants to go on. 
And when one asks why, the answer seems to be, 
that "going on" implies, first of all, the breaking up 
of the adjustment of life to surroundings that make 
us comfortable. I am inclined to think that this 
clinging to the accustomed contains much of "origi- 
nal sin," that is, it is the inherent weakness in which 
sin finds it easy to plant itself, a rooted disinclina- 
tion to effort to which sin finds it easy to appeal. 
The trouble is that forgiveness does not touch this 
difficulty, and the forgiven soul is still the victim 



THE FORGIVENESS OF SINS 483 

of its own spiritual conservatism. It remains, "yea, 
in them that are regenerated." Its corrective, of 
course, is the constant use of grace; but that is 
just what we shrink from. We need in this case 
the steady hand of deliberate discipline. Here, if 
anywhere, a "rule of life" is efficacious ; a rule the 
tendency of which is to raise us above our ordinary 
level of activity and hold us there until we are 
accustomed to spiritual methods of work. 

It is well to remember that the state of forgive- 
ness is a negative state. From much that one reads, 
especially in the literature of conversion, one would 
infer the prevalence of a notion that the soul that 
is pardoned passes at once to a state that, at any 
rate, approaches sanctity, a state that has many of 
the marks of perfection. Now, no doubt, the for- 
given soul, experiencing the joy of pardon, finds it 
easier for the time being to serve and love God. 
And if it has no ideal of holiness, if it is contented 
with the negative notion of innocence, it may find 
the Christian life, as it conceives it, an easy thing. 
But we who conceive the spiritual life of the Chris- 
tian in a very positive way, as a life of continual 
advance in spiritual attainments, find that while 
forgiveness removes barriers and clears the ground, 
as it were, the real work of the Christian life re- 
mains to be done ; it remains that we build on the 
foundation and build with those indestructible ma- 



484 MEDITATIONS ON THE APOSTLES' CREED 

terials, gold, silver and precious stones, which will 
endure the fire of the Judgment. The settler in 
some" newly-opened country concentrates his effort 
on stripping the ground of its age-long growth of 
tangled forest, and when that is done finds that he 
is at the beginning of his task of raising the fruits 
of the earth that are needful for his support. He 
cannot sit at the edge of his clearing and wait for 
them to grow. In that case he would speedily see 
his clearing resumed into the forest once more and 
his work all to do. That is what continually hap- 
pens to souls ; they feel the sickness and burden of 
sin and they are drawn to a repentance that is per- 
fectly sincere, but they do not follow forgiveness 
with the active labour of spiritual cultivation, and 
remain undeveloped spiritually, even when, as is 
most likely, they do not slip back into the old indif- 
ference and selfishness of life. Therein lies the 
grave danger of "revivals" and "missions," or of 
anything that whips the soul into a momentary ap- 
preciation of its sinful state, driving it by the sting 
of an aroused conscience to seek pardon and peace ; 
but also leaving it when that is accomplished with 
a sense that its Christian duty is fulfilled, and that 
any further Christian duties beyond more or less 
regularity in routine Christian living are matters of 
free choice, not of vital necessity. 

The ideal we need to grasp is the ideal of con- 



THE FORGIVENESS OF SINS 485 

stant progress — the progress that carries us from 
the negative state of innocence to the positive state 
of sanctity. Between the two lies the Way of the 
Cross. We pass through this life as cross-bearers, 
faring from Bethlehem over Calvary to the light 
beyond. . Glorious as is the truth contained in the 
forgiveness of sins, let us remember that that for- 
giveness is a beginning and not an end, a prepara- 
tion of the soul for a future of unlimited growth. 
I have not dwelt in this meditation upon what it 
was most obvious to dwell upon, the sacramental 
media of forgiveness. I have, I think, sufficiently 
spoken of them in other connections. Here, I care 
rather to dwell on some consequences of forgive- 
ness. I trust that I have not left the impression on 
any one's mind by what I have just been saying 
that the absolution of the penitent is other than 
entire, that there is any reserve in the pardon that 
God grants. I have only wished to insist that spir- 
itual weakness and immaturity are not subjects of 
pardon but have to be dealt with by the continual 
use of grace. All sins repented of are absolutely 
removed by the grace of absolution, and we are 
restored frankly to God's favour, and not held un- 
der any suspended sentence. It is important that 
we should remember this, for I find that there are 
souls that tend to hold over themselves their past 
sins and recur to them as though they were in 



486 MEDITATIONS ON THE APOSTLES' CREED 

actual existence. I suppose that that is a reflection 
of our own imperfect forgiveness as exercised to- 
wards others. We find it extremely difficult to 
remove from our minds the impression made upon 
us by those who have wronged us. We think that 
we have fully forgiven ; but when we remember the 
sinner we remember him as a sinner, not as a person 
whom we have fully forgiven. We forgive a thief 
or a liar, but we continue to hold them to the char- 
acter of thief or liar, however sure we may be of 
their repentance. Forgiveness in the complete sense 
would seem to be a divine attribute — "I will forgive 
their iniquity, and I will remember their sin no 
more." The entire absolution of the penitent is 
not only the blotting out of the sin but the blotting 
out of the memory of the sin. We have much diffi- 
culty in imagining this, in imagining that such as 
David and the Magdalen can stand high in the 
favour of God. Yet if they cannot, what does for- 
giveness amount to? 

To be sure, God's forgiveness does what ours 
cannot do — cleanses the soul. It is not a change of 
attitude on his part toward the soul ; rather, because 
of a changed attitude of the soul toward him he 
effects the purification of the soul. The streams, 
swollen by the spring rains, come down from the 
uplands filled with the soil they have torn from 
their banks as they passed ; turbid and impure, they 



THE FORGIVENESS OF SINS 487 

are unfit for human use. But we pass them through 
the filter-beds and the water comes out clear and 
sparkling. So life, muddied and stained by sin, is 
passed through the filter-bed of repentance and 
comes out free from defilement, a purified life. 

The soul that has experienced the divine pardon 
has had a new and vivid joy added to life. It has 
gone a step deeper into the meaning of love. In 
our own experience we find, do we not, that if we 
have really forgiven any one we have advanced in 
the love of them? There is a formal forgiveness 
that is a response to our conception of Christian 
duty but which leaves us cold to the person for- 
given — I do not say that that is valueless. But I 
do say that it does not correspond to the divine for- 
giveness. And there is a forgiveness that involves 
an element of love and pity and which draws us 
toward the person forgiven. In the transaction 
there was a sense of a wrong that separated, and 
forgiveness has removed the cause of separation, 
and love and sympathy that had been held back 
flow out freely with new strength. This assumes 
the existence of love in our previous relations. That 
is of course not true of all our relations with one 
another, but it is true of all our relations with God. 
There is never any failure of the love of God toward 
us whatever obstacles we may have put in the way 
of its exercise. 



488 MEDITATIONS ON THE APOSTLES' CREED 

In concluding, let us remember that when we say, 
I believe in the forgiveness of sins, we are imply- 
ing, perhaps, more than the Creed intended to state : 
we are implying the belief in an obligation on our 
part to forgive sins. The extent of that obligation 
I understand when I study God's attitude toward 
sins and the way in which he exercises forgiveness. 
God forgives sins whenever any sinner honestly 
wants to be forgiven. The number of times he has 
sinned and the nature of the sin he has fallen into 
do not matter; the only thing that matters is his 
repentance. More than that : God does not forgive 
grudgingly ; he loves to forgive. He is, as St. James 
says of the heavenly Wisdom, "easy to be en- 
treated." Our hope here and hereafter rests on 
this quality in him. But that we have any right to 
exercise such a hope for ourselves surely rests on 
our possession of the same quality — that we, too, 
are easy to be entreated: that we cherish no thoughts 
of vengeance or sense of wrong, that we bear no 
grudges or harsh judgments. That is our ideal. I 
know that we grow to it slowly; that we find it 
difficult not to remember, not to be thrown back into 
a state of resentment when the sight of the offend- 
ing person brings back the memory of the offence. 
But grow we must and do as Christ Jesus is being 
"formed" in us. 

And it is so good to be forgiven, to feel the friend- 



THE FORGIVENESS OF SINS 489 

ship of God and know that we are safe in his love ; 
to know that we are received to the pardoned life 
with joyful welcome. 

Kind hearts are here ; yet would the tenderest one 
Have limits to its mercy ; — God has none ! 
And man's forgiveness may be true and sweet, — 
But yet he stoops to give it. More complete 
Is love that lays forgiveness at thy feet, 
And pleads with thee to raise it ! Only Heaven 
Means Crowned, not Vanquished, when it says 
"Forgiven"! 



THE TWENTY-THIRD MEDITATION 



THE 
TWENTY-THIRD MEDITATION 

THE RESURRECTION OF THE BODY 
Let us listen to the words of St. Paul — 



m 



E shall not all sleep, but we shall all be 
changed. 



Let us picture — 

The day of the final Resurrection as it appeared 
to the mind of St. Paul. To him it was a "mystery," 
a wonder-work of God, the meaning of which we 
are able to see dimly. To him, too, it was an immi- 
nent event — the trumpet might sound any morning ; 
surely would sound, if the eager hopes of Chris- 
tians were to be fulfilled, some morning soon. The 
world would be going on, unthinking; and then at 

493 



494 MEDITATIONS ON THE APOSTLES CREED 

the trumpet's voice, a mighty change would pass 
over it. In the midst of their busy occupations men 
would be summoned before the Lord, they would 
be caught up to meet him in the air. And not only 
they, but all the host of the dead, the dead of a 
thousand generations, would be there. Let us try 
to think of our Lord returning, clothed in the gar- 
ment of his glorified humanity, shining like the sun 
in his strength, attended by all the hosts of the an- 
gels, compassed by the saints. And then to meet him 
come this host of humanity changed, the mortal and 
corruptible having given place to the resurrection 
body, immortal and incorruptible. This is what St. 
Paul meant when he prayed, Thy Kingdom come. 
He worked and prayed and gave himself without 
stint that he might share in this triumph of the 
Lord from heaven. This to him was the ushering 
in of the final stage of God's work, the full mani- 
festation of God's glory. Think how St. Paul's life 
was supported by vision. Once, before the Damas- 
cus gate, he had seen the heaven open and Jesus in 
the midst of blinding splendour, and the vision had 
changed his life and sent him forth to the arduous 
labour of his apostolate. Once again, he had been 
caught up into the "Third Heaven" and heard 
"unspeakable words" which had confirmed and 
strengthened him. And he looks forward to an- 
other heavenly sight when the Lord shall come in 



THE RESURRECTION OF THE BODY 495 

his glory and all the holy angels with him to judge 
both the quick and the dead. This will be the 
crown and reward of all that has gone before ; this 
will be the vindication of the life of the Christian, 
proving "their labour not in vain in the Lord." 

Consider, first — 

That the characteristic of the changed body of 
the resurrection that seems uppermost in the mind 
of the apostle, is its glory : — It is raised in glory. 
He is not thinking, as we are wont to think, of the 
constitution of the body and its relation to the 
material ; rather, he is thinking of the body as the 
vehicle of something, and that something now in 
the resurrection so expresses itself through the body 
that the result is an effulgent splendour. All along, 
the important thing about our bodies has been that 
they were the instruments, the medium of the activi- 
ties, of our spirits. But in our earthly life they are 
resisting mediums. The flesh lusteth against the 
spirit, and there is continual warfare. But the 
spirit of the Christian tends always to gain the 
dominance, to subdue the appetites whose seat is in 
the flesh. As the spirit gains, its powers flood the 
body and control it, but they do not dispense with 
it. But in the resurrection this mortal body is no 
longer the fit instrument of the spirit, and the bodily 
nature that we then receive is one adapted to the 



496 MEDITATIONS ON THE APOSTLES' CREED 

spirit's use. Spiritual, immortal, incorruptible, it is 
in every way responsive to the spirit's needs; and 
the redeemed spirit that dwells in it floods it with 
its own glory, or rather, not its own glory, but the 
glory that is its because of its union with its Lord. 
That glory of God which shone in the face of Jesus 
Christ when he was transfigured before his wonder- 
ing disciples, shines, too, in the faces of the re- 
deemed of Christ, when their mortality being swal- 
lowed up in life, they become, in their own order, 
the medium through which he manifests himself. 

Consider, second — 

That our present time of discipline is the prepara- 
tion of our spirits for their hour of victorious mani- 
festation. They have to win their way to glory. 
Every victory gained over passion or appetite is an 
added strength to the spirit, making it more hopeful 
of future victories. Spiritual struggles do not end 
in themselves, as pointless combats with enemies 
that return again and again to the fight ; they mark 
stages of advance toward the full growth of the 
spiritual powers that, when they have reached their 
maturity, will be able to express themselves com- 
pletely through higher media. Of the nature of 
these media we can give no complete account for 
what the symbol body will mean when we add to 
it the notion spiritual, is not clear ; but we are sure 



THE RESURRECTION OF THE BODY 497 

that it means a medium of expression, not of re- 
pression, as we find our bodies now to be. There 
are so many of our spiritual attempts that are 
checked and thwarted by the incapacity of the body 
to co-operate with them. Our prayers, for instance, 
that we would fain make longer and of greater in- 
tensity, are foiled by the mere weariness of the 
body. There are so many hours when we would 
pass the time on our knees when the body, ex- 
hausted by the labours of the day, denies us the 
necessary strength even to maintain the attitude of 
prayer. To many of us the late evening, when the 
occupations of the day are behind us, is the time 
that we could best give to meditation ; but the tired 
brain will not permit us, will not respond to the 
effort to think. Consider what it would be to find 
ourselves endowed with a medium of activity that 
was exactly responsive and adequately responsive 
to our slightest spiritual movement! Great zeal 
and great love will, indeed, effect something of that 
now. We read of saints that have so conquered the 
body by the spirit that they become at times uncon- 
scious of its existence, and impose upon it the will 
of the spirit. But only sometimes. Ordinarily the 
body is too strong for us and imposes its will. In 
the resurrection body this will of the spirit will be 
permanent and imperative, and will manifest itself 
without hindrance. 



49 8 MEDITATIONS ON THE APOSTLES' CREED 

s Let us, then, pray — 

That we may attain to the glory of the resurrec- 
tion. Let us pray that we may be found worthy to 
be numbered among those who shall attend our 
Lord at his coming. 

O Merciful God, the Father of our Lord Jesus 
Christ, who is the Resurrection and the Life; in 
whom whosoever believeth, shall live, though he die ; 
and whosoever liveth, and believeth in him, shall 
not die eternally; who also hath taught us, by his 
Holy Apostle Saint Paul, not to be sorry, as men 
without hope, for those who sleep in him ; we hum- 
bly beseech thee, O Father, to raise us from the 
death of sin unto the life of righteousness ; that, 
when we shall depart this life, we may rest in him ; 
and that, at the general Resurrection in the last 
day, we may be found acceptable in thy sight; and 
receive that blessing, which thy well-beloved Son 
shall then pronounce to all who love and fear thee, 
saying, Come, ye blessed children of my Father, 
receive the kingdom prepared for you from the be- 
ginning of the world. Grant this, we beseech thee, 
O Merciful Father, through Jesus Christ, our Me- 
diator and Redeemer. 

The evidential value of our Lord's resurrection 
was twofold : it was the seal placed upon the truth 
of his teaching, the vindication of his lifework, the 



THE RESURRECTION OF THE EODY 499 

proof of his Messiahship — of these things God gave 
assurance when he raised him from the dead; but 
also his resurrection is the prophecy and pledge that 
we too shall rise from the dead. What the nature 
of that resurrection will be we can know only by 
inference from the resurrection of our Lord: it 
must mean in us what it meant in him, the resump- 
tion of activities in the completeness of human na- 
ture, but human nature modified to meet the new 
conditions under which we shall henceforth live. It 
is at once true that we shall be the same and that 
we shall be changed. 

We shall be the same persons. The principle of 
identity that makes us one through the whole of our 
life is not anything depending upon the material 
organisation of our bodies : it is the spiritual per- 
sonality that persists through all material change. 
We are the same persons from year to year, and 
know it by the evidence of memory, among other 
things. It is this person that at death is removed 
to the "other world," where it lives a life of con- 
scious activity; it is the same person who will rise 
again from the dead. 

And will rise embodied, with a body that belongs 
to it, and is the fitting medium of its action. I do 
not think that it is at all certain that we are ever in 
a completely disembodied condition. Some sort of 
envelope would seem to me to be not unsuitable, if 



500 MEDITATIONS ON THE APOSTLES' CREED 

not actually required, as the medium of the created 
spirit's action under any conditions. The specula- 
tion that attributes bodies to all created spirits would 
seem to me very well grounded. Of course, when 
one says bodies, one is thinking of something quite 
different from the material body as it appears to 
the senses. But when one asks, What is matter? 
the answers that are given by the latest scientific 
investigation so remove materiality as we have been 
accustomed to understand it, from the ultimate con- 
stitution of material things, that one has no difficulty 
in thinking of the spirit at death going to the other 
world clothed in some sort of envelope which is the 
medium of its action. Nor has one any longer the 
old haunting difficulties about matter in relation to 
the body of the resurrection. All the old discus- 
sions about the identity of the resurrection body 
with the buried body, identity in material particles, 
I mean, have become quite pointless in view of our 
present knowledge of matter. And on the other 
hand, the changed body of the resurrection, that 
immortal, incorruptible, spiritual body of St. Paul's 
teaching, becomes intelligible ; and, if we may sup- 
pose the continuous embodiment of the spirit in 
some sort of envelope carried over from the mortal 
body, and becoming the basis of the resurrection 
body, the speculative difficulty of the resurrection 
would seem to be reduced to as low terms as we 



THE RESURRECTION OF THE BODY 501 

can expect in a matter so removed from experience. 
In any case, as far as revelation casts light on 
the matter, the resurrected body is notable for its 
differences from, rather than its likeness to, our 
present body. We may sum this up by saying that 
its function is to transmit and mediate spiritual ac- 
tivities. It will be able to adapt itself to all forms, 
of the spirit's work, even as our Lord's resurrection 
body adapted itself to his activity. I do not under- 
stand that our Lord's passing through closed doors 
into the room where the disciples were assembled 
for fear of the Jews was a miracle in the same 
sense that it would have been had he performed 
the same act before his resurrection ; rather, it is 
intelligible as the result of the modification that has 
taken place in his body consequent upon his resur- 
rection — the sort of modification that is in the mind 
of St. Paul when he says of those who are living at 
the last day that they shall be changed. We get at 
much the same result when we think of the impres- 
sion that was made by our Lord on the Apostles 
after the resurrection. It was now an impression 
of great awe, again of entire strangeness, or again, 
of familiarity ; and all, it would appear, because of 
the power of the spiritual nature to produce modifi- 
cations in the bodily nature at will. In the resur- 
rection, we conclude, the body responds to and ex- 
presses the will of the spirit without opposing any 



501 MEDITATIONS ON THE APOSTLES CREED 

opposition; and yet it remains a body, that is, a 
medium through which the spirit acts. 

This union of body and spirit is essential to our 
being human. Our humanity consists in such 
union, and one of the grounds for thinking that the 
spirit in the state between death and the final resur- 
rection is still embodied, is that without a body it 
loses its humanity. We cannot think of a body as 
an accidental and temporary thing in man ; it is as 
eternal as we are, as necessary to our humanity as 
our spirit. And we know that our Lord, when he 
took our humanity took it permanently. In becom- 
ing man, he did not unite himself permanently to 
our spirit and temporarily to our body, but he 
united himself to both in an indissoluble union, so 
indissoluble that in the period between his death 
and resurrection his divinity was united with the 
body that lay in Joseph's tomb as well as with the 
spirit that was in Paradise. And we, being re- 
deemed by him and regenerated and made one 
with him, are not united in will and thought with 
his divinity, but are united in body and spirit with 
his humanity and divinity. It is not part of man- 
hood that is taken into God, but entire manhood; 
and it is not part of the individual man that is 
united to God through the extension of the Incar- 
nation to us, but the entire man. The theories that 
dispense with the body, whether in the resurrection 



THE RESURRECTION OF THE BODY 503 

of our Lord, or in our resurrection, ignore and 
abandon the whole notion of the Incarnation. 

Because of this permanence of the body as a 
permanent element in our humanity, and because of 
its relation to the Body of the Incarnation, this hu- 
man body has a relative holiness and demands to be 
treated with the highest respect. Under present 
conditions it is not only the dwelling-place of our 
spirit, but it is the dwelling-place of the Holy Spirit. 
Indeed, our resurrection itself is connected with this 
presence of the Spirit in us. "If the Spirit of him 
that raised up Jesus from the dead dwell in you, he 
that raised up Christ from the dead shall also 
quicken your mortal bodies by his Spirit that dwell- 
eth in you." His sanctifying work extends to the 
body wherein he abides. St. Paul elsewhere recalls 
Christians to a sense of what is implied in their 
vocation : "Know ye not that ye are the temple of 
God, and that the Spirit of God dwelleth in you?" 
This is the ground of the demand for purity: "If 
any man defile the temple of God, him shall God 
destroy ; for the temple of God is holy, which temple 
ye are." 

Sins of impurity are especially gross, as they 
imply a deep-seated revolt against the mind of the 
Spirit, and a surrender to the demands of the flesh. 
And it is not only the sins that we customarily rec- 
ognise and class under the head of impurity that 



504 MEDITATIONS ON THE APOSTLES' CREED 

fall under the condemnation of defiling the temple 
of God, but a large number of other sins that we do 
not give in our thought the same character. Obvi- 
ously, we must class here the sins of gluttony, of 
abuse of the body in the matter of food and drink, 
and the pampering of the self that is involved in 
the inordinate luxury of our time. In the matter of 
food and drink, if one were to judge by the state of 
people's consciences, nothing is reckoned as sinful 
save actual drunkenness. But that is not the Bibli- 
cal view. There can be no question that such over- 
indulgence in food and drink as amounts to sin is 
very common. To be called to the Christian life is 
to be called to a restrained and disciplined life. "I 
keep under my body," is its motto. 

But do we keep under our bodies? Does not the 
increasing luxury of the times sweep more and more 
of us within its influence ? So soon as we are pos- 
sessed of anything we are possessed by it. Are we 
not becoming more and more dependent on things ? 
And yet we cannot altogether dispense with things. 
Where draw the line ? I read in my paper that such 
and such a woman has given a party at the expense 
of one hundred thousand dollars. Let us suppose 
that there is some newspaper exaggeration; the 
truth will be disgusting enough after all deductions 
have been made. And then I try to translate the 
event into terms of my own life. Is there any cor- 



THE RESURRECTION OF THE BODY 5 05 

responding waste there? Any like failure in re- 
sponsibility for the things that I possess? I am 
constantly compelled to deny appeals for help — 
why I am, perhaps, even irritable when appeals 
are pressed upon me — why? Is there any lurking 
sense that I am a bad steward and am wasting my 
Master's goods on objects of merely personal sig- 
nificance and self-indulgence? It is every priest's 
experience that by far the greater number of his 
congregation will decline to answer appeals for 
money, that, indeed, many of them resent such 
appeals. It is pretty certain that most of them 
honestly think that they cannot afford to give. But 
they are constantly spending money upon luxuries. 
Now, while it is tremendously difficult to lay down 
a programme in such matters, it is absolutely cer- 
tain that luxury is one of the greatest dangers of 
modern life. We are a pampered and self-indulgent 
people. I do not see how we can be acquitted of 
constant sin against the body which is the temple 
of the Holy Ghost. 

And in the matter of sins of impurity in the strict 
sense, are we not content with personal purity and 
excuse ourselves from any protest against sins of 
that class, acquiescing in the prevalent low stand- 
ard of morals? There are many weak persons that 
allow themselves sinful practices because they feel 
that they are prevalent, that no one thinks much 



506 MEDITATIONS ON THE APOSTLES' CREED 

about them, that society, while not approving, ac- 
quiesces in them as things that cannot be helped. 
Such people will be helped to abide by a high 
standard if they feel that that standard is really 
valued and emphasised in the minds of their ac- 
quaintances. It helps a young man or boy to be 
pure if he finds that purity is really valued and 
thought possible in the circle where he moves. But 
if purity is not expected of him and it is as respect- 
able to be impure as pure, he is likely to fall. The 
low standard of the marriage relation that is evi- 
denced by the declining birth-rate is surely due to 
luxurious habits and an expensive standard of liv- 
ing. Here again the pressure of Christian opinion 
might do much. And so it might do much against 
the "double standard" of purity that is one of the 
indications that our civilisation is still heathen at 
the core. One person can do little; but every per- 
son who is really caring and protesting in such 
matters is helping to create a Christian standard of 
life in the community. 

There can be no doubt at all that the connection 
between the body and the spirit is so close that the 
state of the one has a distinct effect on the other. 
Especially is it true that a pampered body cannot be 
an organ of vision. The prophets and saints who 
have lived in the close friendship of God have been, 
I think without exception, men and women of dis- 



THE RESURRECTION OF THE BODY 507 

ciplined life. They have been ascetics in the true 
sense of the word, that is, they have submitted their 
lives to strict self-restraint. We know in our own 
experience how what we call "a little harmless self- 
indulgence" deadens the spirit. If we have been 
living carefully and strictly, we have only to relax 
our care for a few days to find an immediate cor- 
respondence in relaxation in the spiritual life : our 
meditations and prayers become much more diffi- 
cult, and our communions are much less followed 
up. Or we have but to pass a few days in society 
that is conspicuously careless in religious or moral 
tone to find that the association is telling on us ; not 
that we have conformed to the tone of the sur- 
rounding society, but we are feeling less of repul- 
sion and more of what we denominate toleration. 
The spirit is depressed by bodily influences and sur- 
roundings, and is less attentive and responsive to 
the divine voice of the Spirit. That is what those 
men of old felt when they forsook the world and 
betook themselves to the silence of deserts that they 
might be alone with God. Without criticising this, 
I am convinced that this is not the solution; it 
avoids or transfers the problem rather than solves 
it. I question if we have the right to change our 
condition in such wise even if we have the power — 
which most of us have not. The battle for the con- 
trol and discipline of the body must be fought out 



5©8 MEDITATIONS ON THE APOSTLES'' CREED 

in the midst of society if it is to be helpful to society 
in the best sense ; and surely we have that obligation 
in mind in the ordering of our lives. If it is harder 
to live a pure life in New York than it is in a desert, 
it is also a greater contribution to the cause of the 
Body of Christ of which I am a member and whose 
good I must minister to. 

It is no doubt carrying too far our present no- 
tions of the physical body into the region of the 
spiritual to base our belief in recognition of one 
another in the future world upon the notion of 
physical likeness. We shall no doubt know one 
another, but there are other means of recognition 
beside physical means. Much of the speculation 
that has been indulged in in such matters is use- 
less, and some of it worse than useless. There are 
many questions to which we have no answer. The 
sufficient answer to the question, Shall we be raised 
as we die? would seem to be St. Paul's saying: It 
is sown a natural body, it is raised a spiritual body. 
Some speculators on the subject have held that we 
shall all be raised in the maturity of powers, no mat- 
ter at what age we die ; the child of tender age and 
the old man shall alike be raised in the maturity of 
manly vigour. But surely what we are raised in is 
the fulness of spiritual vigor, which has no equiva- 
lent in physical stature or units of time. 

Our present life viewed as a life of preparation 



THE RESURRECTION OF THE BODY 509 

for the resurrection needs to make emphatic the 
possible sanctity of material things through their 
associations with things spiritual. It is an appli- 
cation of the truth of the sanctity of the creation. 
There have always been tendencies in human 
thought to separate the material from the spiritual, 
and either to deny any connection or to put them in 
sharp opposition. Our own age is not without such 
tendencies. They find expression in impatience of 
any discipline and theories of the evil of pain or 
denials of its real existence. The sort of spiritual- 
ity which strives to free itself from matter as a sort 
of degrading association strikes at the very root of 
the Incarnation, or, indeed, of creation. It ends in 
blurring all the fundamental Christian conceptions : 
sin, redemption, the sacramental action of God. 
And not much less to be deprecated is that view of 
Christian facts which regards the resurrection as 
spiritual and our future state as the state of dis- 
embodied spirits. We shall avoid such errors and 
their deep-seated consequences in this life, if we 
hold fast to the belief that our future life, however 
spiritual, will still be a life in a body, that is, the 
life of a spirit functioning through a containing 
envelope. We shall not then think lightly of sin 
nor rebel against pain, as passing phenomena inci- 
dent to a temporary state from which death will 
release us. We shall not think of sin as "error" or 



5IO MEDITATIONS ON THE APOSTLES' CREED 

"imperfection," which yet is guiltless as having been 
imposed upon us by an imperfect environment ; nor 
of pain as a spiritual mistake due to yielding to 
vicious thoughts. Rather, we shall see sin to be 
the revolt of the spirit from the will of God and 
failure to hallow him in all his works; and pain to 
be part of the discipline of life that rises through 
the power of its endurance to union with its Cruci- 
fied Master. We shall look forward with joy to the 
time when united, spirit and body, to the Incarnate, 
we become perfectly that which we are now imper- 
fectly, the glad and unresisting instruments of his 
will, and the partakers of his glory. 



THE TWENTY-FOURTH MEDITATION 



THE 
TWENTY-FOURTH MEDITATION 

THE LIFE EVERLASTING 
Let us listen to the words of St. John — 



B 



ND I saw a new heaven and a new earth : for 
the first heaven and the first earth were 
passed away. 



Let us picture — 

Some of the details of the heavenly world as it 
appeared to the vision of St. John. It is at once a 
world of varied beauty and a world of throbbing 
life. In the midst of heaven is the throne of God, 
circled with splendour of the emerald rainbow ; for 
here, too, the mercy and the love of God are empha- 
sised, and though lightnings and thunderings and 

5U 



514 MEDITATIONS ON THE APOSTLES' CREED 

voices proceed from the throne, the rainbow spans 
them all. And before the throne is the Lamb, as it 
had been slain, and all the angel choirs of heaven 
stand about, and as the elders empty those vials of 
gold, which are full of the intercession of the saints, 
the ever-echoing song of heaven goes up and breaks 
in great waves of music about the throne of God 
and of the Lamb. Heaven is thronged with life; 
there are the living creatures and the elders ; there 
are the hundred and forty and four thousand of the 
pure ones who follow the Lamb whithersoever he 
goeth — the flower of the earthly church. The 
church itself is revealed in its attained ideal. We, 
whose eyes are dimmed and blinded by the smoke 
and dust of the battle which we wage in the church 
militant here on earth, are permitted to see what it 
is that we are fighting for, what is the destiny of the 
church that we so readily despair of. We see it 
revealed, descending out of heaven, "having the 
glory of God : and her light was like unto a stone 
most precious, even a jasper stone, clear as crystal." 
This is our dwelling-place, our home, for all eter- 
nity. "The tabernacle of God is with men, and he 
shall dwell with them, and they shall be his people, 
and God shall be with them, and shall be their God. 
And God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes ; 
and there shall be no more death, neither sorrow, 
nor crying, neither shall there be any more pain: 



THE LIFE EVERLASTING 515 

for the former things are passed away." Let us 
take heart and fare on toward the Holy City. 

Consider, first — 

That all this gorgeous imagery of the Book of 
the Revelations is not mere poetic verbiage, the 
many-coloured flight of the Oriental imagination, 
indulging its passion for the picturesque in a revelry 
of splendid words. Its images stand for facts that 
have impressed themselves on the soul of the saint 
as he meditated on the heavenly world, but facts of 
so strange an order that he finds difficulty in trans- 
lating them into human speech. As St. John piles 
image upon image, calling to his aid all that seems 
splendid or desirable to man, catching symbols from 
his art and from his worship, he is visibly strug- 
gling with the limitations of human thought and 
human language in the attempt to utter the unutter- 
able. The realities of heaven transcend human ex- 
perience and the possibilities of human expression : 
they can only be hinted at in image and symbol. 
This is the ultimate difficulty with all intense relig- 
ious experience ; it deals with realities of a spiritual 
order, which can only be felt, and not described. 
Our deepest communings with the world that is 
above sense we are unable to put into terms of 
sense, and, therefore, when we try to speak of them 
our words seem as idle tales to those whom we try 



$l6 MEDITATIONS ON THE APOSTLES' CREED 

to let into our secret. The saints who have had 
immediate experience of the supernatural world, 
either, like St. Paul, give over the attempt to tell us 
ivhat their experience was ; or, like St. John, strive 
"vainly to convey their meaning in words of another 
order of experience which only dimly and frag- 
mentarily hint at what is in their mind. They are 
like children returning from some wondrous spec- 
tacle, whose attempts to describe to us what they 
have seen, make us certain of the reality of their 
experience rather than convey to us knowledge of 
what they saw. But we borrow from them their 
intense conviction of the reality that they have seen, 
and attempt to broaden our own experience till it 
shall measure, in some detail of it, with theirs. I, 
John, saw; but alas! there are no words adequate 
to tell what he saw. Why, then, try to tell us? 
Why not leave us, as St. Paul does, with the assur- 
ance that what he saw was unutterable? 

Consider, second — 

That this is why : that there may be enkindled in 
tis, as we muse and ponder the unintelligible words, 
spiritual desire. The travellers who come back 
from far countries and tell of skies of another blue 
and sunsets of another splendour; of forests of 
strange mystery and birds of gorgeous hue, awake 
in us the desire to share their experience, and send 



THE LIFE EVERLASTING 517 

us forth to find it for ourselves. We know enough 
of the world that they have described to be sure 
that it is a possible world, we have touched the 
fringes of it in our own dull lives. So the Christian 
knows enough of the meaning of spiritual experi- 
ence to feel that the saint is speaking to him of 
things of the same order of reality, that he needs 
only to push his own experience of the spiritual life 
a little deeper to verify for himself the reports of 
the saint. So he sets himself to the study of the 
higher spiritual experience; and feels that his ca- 
pacity to pierce through the symbol to the reality, 
and get behind the form to the essence, is in some 
wise a test of his own spiritual vitality. Thus the 
Book of the Revelations becomes to us a challenge. 
If John saw, there is no reason why we .should not, 
at least, see the meaning of his symbols, why we 
should not tear the heart out of them, and look 
through his eyes in at the open door of heaven. The 
condition is, that we should be what he was, pure 
in heart: the pure in heart see God. The desire for 
vision resolves itself into the desire for purity, and 
the response to purity is increased capacity for 
vision. As the soul grows pure its purity is evi- 
denced by an increasing sympathy with all those 
things that pertain to the life everlasting, the per- 
manent things that are eternal in the heavens, and 
are only passingly revealed in the life of earth. Do 



518 MEDITATIONS ON THE APOSTLES' CREED 

these things attract us ? Do the pages of the Revela- 
tions reflect themselves in our souls in feelings, in 
aspirations, in longings; begetting in us desire and 
hope which are perfectly real, though we cannot 
verify their objects, or communicate them to others? 
Do they beget in us, above all, desire for God ? 

Let us, then, pray — 

That the door in heaven may be opened to us, 
and that we may see visions of God. Let us pray 
for the fervency of spiritual desire. 

God, of unchangeable power and eternal light, 
look favourably on thy whole Church, that wonder- 
ful and sacred mystery: and by the tranquil opera- 
tion of thy perpetual providence carry out the work 
of man's salvation : and let the whole world see and 
feel that the things which were cast down are being 
raised up: that those things which had grown old 
are being made new ; and that all things are return- 
ing to perfection, through him from whom they took 
their origin, even our Lord, Jesus Christ. 

1 believe in the Life Everlasting — so we close our 
Creed with a note of aspiration and hope. We be- 
gan with a profession of belief in God from whom 
all things came forth in the creation ; we close still 
with a belief in God who shall end by gathering all 
things back to unity with himself. In him was life, 



THE LIFE EVERLASTING 519 

and the life was the light lightening every man, 
coming into the world, and guiding him on his dark 
way through the world; and in him is eternal life 
by participation in which man comes into union 
with his Maker and Redeemer, a union to be hence- 
forth undisturbed and unbroken. The end of the 
present order is that the Lord shall be revealed 
from heaven, that mortality shall be swallowed up 
in life, and that in the new heaven and the new 
earth we shall receive our heritage as citizens of 
his eternal and everlasting kingdom. Now we look 
for "a city that hath foundations, whose maker and 
builder is God" : then we shall enter into a city, the 
New Jerusalem which cometh "down from God out 
of heaven, prepared as a bride adorned for her 
husband" — a city that lieth foursquare in its 
achieved perfection. 

A new heaven and a new earth — how wonderful 
the thought is ! It touches us, as the cooling breeze 
of the sunset touches the head weary with the 
labour and heat of the day. Our whole nature goes 
out to it, we need it and we want it. There was a 
time, perhaps, when this world seemed all in all to 
us, when we were satisfied and wanted no other 
world. Its pleasures and its possibilities seemed 
limitless, and we desired nothing more than that we 
might possess it in ever greater fulness. One tries 
to picture to oneself something of the mind of a 



520 MEDITATIONS ON THE APOSTLES' CREED 

boy brought up in one of those old castles of the 
Middle Ages where life was so shut in from the 
contact of the great world without. To the boy 
there life would come as a congeries of detached 
fragments, pieced together from many sources. It 
would come to him almost by chance, from passing 
travellers. As the evening fell, and the inmates of 
the castle were gathered in the hall lit by the flare 
of torches, the palmer would tell of the wonders of 
strange lands and strange folk he had met in his 
pilgrimage, and the adventures that befell those that 
sought the Holy Sepulchre. The merchant, as he 
spread his wares, would tell the news of the distant 
city and the latest reports from over sea. The 
wandering knight would have his tales of court and 
camp; and the troubadour, that sang in the court- 
yard, would by his songs awake the heart to 
dreams of love. What fascinating and exciting 
glimpses of the world beyond the hills would come 
to the boy-soul, and how he would long for his 
page's suit, that he might go out and join the gay 
throng at the court, or his first suit of armour, that 
he might go forth to win the spurs of a knight. We 
have all of us faced the world, perhaps, with some- 
thing of that longing, and chafed against the re- 
strictions that kept us from the world beyond the 
hills. It seems to spread out before us in limitless 
fields of conquest where we are sure we can win. 



THE LIFE EVERLASTING 531 

It looks so big and so good — this earth. It is filled 
with so many joyous things, stuffed full of possi- 
bilities. We could do so many things with it — and 
the whole earth laughed responsive to our hope. 

But the day came when we passed from hope to 
experience, and instead of glorious conquests we 
came home wounded and weak from the battle. 
There was strife enough, and enough of adventure, 
but we wearied of the strife and the adventure 
palled. The words about world-weariness which 
we had impatiently protested against as the plati- 
tudes of the aged, or of those who had made failure 
of life, turn out to be the expression of our own 
mind. It may be a platitude, but it is also the truth, 
that the joy that the world has to give wears out, 
and leaves us longing for some deeper and more 
lasting joy. The sun goes westering and the shad- 
ows of the evening come trooping on, and how little 
fulfilment there has been of the promise of the morn. 
Our hopes are still unrealised and our ambitions 
unattained, or if there has been great measure of 
success there is small measure of permanent joy. 
Life has become dim and gray, and in so many 
cases bitterly disappointing, and we can no longer 
hope for much from it. 

Unless, perchance, we hope for a good deal ! Un- 
less, perchance, the life has not yet realised its ambi- 
tions, not because they escaped its eager grasp, but 



5 22 MEDITATIONS ON THE APOSTLES' CREED 

because its ambitions centre about the eternal 
things that can only be glimpsed here. The sunset 
has its sadness, but it has its glories too; if it tells 
of the fading day, it also throws its lingering beams 
out beyond the world. We look beyond "the flaming 
ramparts of the world" which once shut in our 
vision, out to that "beyond" which must soon cease 
to be vague dreamland, and become actual experi- 
ence. A new heaven and a new earth — how attrac- 
tive it sounds ! We have found this so disappoint- 
ing, we have met so much of pain and disaster! 
Pain and sin have formed so huge a part of human 
experience, as we read it. A new heaven and a new 
earth, wherein dwelleth righteousness, as another 
apostle saw it. And we turn our faces cheerily to- 
ward the sunset, and the purple and gold and crim- 
son of it seem reflections of the rainbow glory that 
circles the throne of God. We fare forward with a 
wealth of new hope in our souls — the hope that we 
shall see God, God in his unveiled glory, surrounded 
by the hosts of the beatified. 

The Saints of God, their wanderings done, 

No more their weary course they run, 

No more they faint, no more they fall, 

No foes oppress, no fears appall ; 

O happy Saints, forever blest, 

In that dear home, how sweet your rest. 



THE LIFE EVERLASTING 513 

Let us recall, what I have, perhaps, insisted upon 
enough already, that the life everlasting, that eter- 
nal life of which our Lord speaks so often as the 
object of his mission, is not a future gift, but a 
present acquisition. The future life of heaven 
which we now believe awaits us, is but the unfold- 
ing of that germ of life that was implanted in us 
when we were sacramentally united to our Blessed 
Lord. We now have eternal life, and our power to 
live to the Spirit and not to the flesh is the mani- 
festation of that life. Our experience of the work- 
ings of the Holy Spirit in us, our gradual ingather- 
ing of those fruits of the Spirit that are the evi- 
dences of our conformity to his will, are day by day 
revealing to us the nature of the life that in its 
fulness awaits us. The possession of these "fruits" 
ought to go far to remove from us that feeling that 
I suppose we all at some time experience, of the 
strangeness of heaven. It comes over us, when we 
think of the other world, that however glorious it 
shall be, it will, after all, be an unfamiliar world. 
It will look different, and our associations will be 
different, and the manner of our living will be dif- 
ferent, and it is without question that we cling to 
the known and the familiar. You remember the 
story of the roadmender, how he sat by the bedside 
of a man dying in a London garret. There came a 
minister of God, and spoke of repentance, and of 



524 MEDITATIONS ON THE APOSTLES' CREED 

the beauty of heaven. After he had gone the dying 
man lay and gazed blankly at the broken sky line 
of the tenement roofs, accentuated by the chimney- 
pots. And then, " 'E said as 'ow there were golding 
streets in them parts. I ain't no ways perticler wot 
they're made of, but it'll feel natral like if there's 
chimbleys too." 

Will it feel "natral like" — heaven? We are so 
afraid that it will not. But it happens to us some- 
times to go to a place of which we know nothing, 
and the thing that helps us to go is that we have a 
friend there whom we are to meet. And there are 
friends in heaven. Above all, One Supreme Friend. 
And if we have known him here and are sure of 
his friendship, then there will be no strangeness 
there. The best preparation of the soul for heaven 
is in its possession now of the qualities that are 
eternal. Those fruits of the Spirit that we were 
just thinking of are permanent things which find 
their completest place of exercise in the other world. 
Love, and devotion to all pure things, — these will 
fit us for the life to come. 

One imagines that one of the great joys of the 
Life Everlasting will lie in its sense of freedom. 
This life is, in so many ways, a disappointed life; 
we form so many plans that are not permitted to 
come to anything. There is a story of a woman 
who in the early days of the revival of the religious 



THE LIFE EVERLASTING 525 

life of England, felt strong vocation to enter a Sis- 
terhood. She went to the convent ; but she had been 
there but a short while when a relative fell ill and 
there was no one to take care of her, so the novice 
left the convent for this God-given work of nursing. 
It was years before she was released from it ; but 
when freedom came she went joyfully back to the 
religious house, only shortly to be called out to the 
same experience. That was her life ; one after an- 
other, people came to depend upon her, and she 
willingly gave her life to them, because it was God's 
will that she should serve him thus. It was only 
when she was an old woman, far too old to begin 
the Sister's life, that she was free. But through it 
all her desire of the religious life had not grown 
dim. 

In heaven we shall see God's will so clearly and 
love it so much that there will be no sense of a dis- 
appointed life; no work to be done, whether will- 
ingly or unwillingly, which we feel to be aside from 
our true work. There will be no ambitions that we 
entertain that will be thwarted, because we shall be 
ambitious only to serve God. The life will expand 
in all gladness of service in the presence of our 
Lord. 

Perhaps the greatest attraction that heaven has 
for us at present lies, not in the positive joys that 
it promises to us, but in what it promises to take 



5*6 MEDITATIONS ON THE APOSTLES' CREED 

away. We long for heaven for what it is not. The 
limitations, the pains, the disappointments of earth 
weigh heavy on even the happiest of us. And where 
pain and sorrow are absent, we have the sense that 
they may be just lurking around the corner for 
us — they are never far from any life. The thought 
of being free from these, of having all tears wiped 
away from off all faces, is the strongest attraction 
of the life of the future. There always remains a 
certain unwillingness in our suffering, and even 
when we recognise it as a needful part of our dis- 
cipline and the evidence of the Cross in our lives, 
we are fain to escape. And we read with ever new 
fascination the so wonderful saying of St. John, 
"There shall be no more sea." The sea with all 
that it stands for of restlessness and separation and 
loss, shall be done away. O that we might pass into 
a sealess world. 

Yet are not such feelings the result of weariness, 
and, perhaps, of feelings mingled with a little of 
cowardice? If we value heaven, surely we shall 
value the time that is given us for preparation, and 
shall be eager to use every passing hour as one 
more opportunity, God-given, to make ourselves 
ready to meet him. There is so much to do ! Our 
powers when we come, perhaps late in life, to real- 
ise our responsibility for their use, are so feeble and 
so immature ; we have wasted so many golden days 



THE LIFE EVERLASTING 5*7 

of our youth far from the Father's house ; we have 
shown so little of energy and zeal in the things that 
we have undertaken to do; that whatever of time 
may still be given us in the mercy of God, seems all 
too short. If our Lord worked in the sense of the 
coming night, how shall not we much more? 

When we come to die we shall not find 
The day has been too long for any of us 
To have fulfilled the perfect law of Christ. 
Who is there that can say, "My part is done 
In this ; now I am ready for a law 
More wide, more perfect for the rest of life" ? 
Is any living that has not come short? 
Has any died that was not short at last? 

Whenso'er it comes — 
That summons that we look for — it will seem 
Soon, yea, too soon ! Let us take heed in time 
That God may now be glorified in us ! 

Surely it will look strange to us as we look back 
on this life from another world, that we did our 
work so ill and with so little sense of responsibility. 

We shall marvel why we grudged 
Our labour here, and idly judged 
Of heaven. 

And ought not the call to labour that runs so 
through the whole of the Gospel be a very welcome 
call? It is the call to attend to our highest inter- 
ests. Life is aimless to so many; just what they 



5*8 MEDITATIONS ON THE APOSTLES' CREED 

need to give it zest and savour is to have the way 
pointed to some worthy occupation. "Idlers all day 
about the market-place" may be so easily the ac- 
count of our lives. And yet life may be so filled 
with teeming interests that are closely related to God 
and our preparation to meet him. One cannot es- 
cape the conclusion, in view of what we know of the 
life of the hereafter, that we shall all of us pass out 
of life, with many of our spiritual powers uncalled 
out, and, indeed, unsuspected. Anyone who has 
studied at all deeply the mysteries of the spiritual 
life will have become convinced that our ordinary 
living barely touches the surface of our spirituality. 
I am not thinking of those who ignore spiritual 
things altogether, and pass through life as though its 
possibilities were exhausted in their dealings with 
material facts, hardly recognising the fact of their 
own immortality. I am thinking of those who give 
a good deal of attention to their personal religion. 
They must feel that the energy of prayer is some- 
thing that they conceive in a very slight degree; 
that the wonderful promises of God about prayer 
are unused by them ; that they have not the spiritual 
strength to take God at his word. When we think 
what a prayer is when we throw our whole soul into 
it, and cast ourselves utterly on the word of our 
Lord, we understand how we fall short of praying 
as we should in our daily devotions. And what we 



THE LIFE EVERLASTING 5 2 9 

call service — does that at all approximate any divine 
ideal of labour for the kingdom of God And yet 
our Lord's words are never sterner than when he 
is speaking of the idlers and drones in the kingdom 
of heaven. 

What are we set on earth for? Say, to toil; 
Nor seek to leave thy tending of the vines 
For all the heat of the day, till it declines, 

And death's mild curfew shall from work assoil. 

God did anoint thee with his odorous oil 
To wrestle, not to reign. 

When we shall come to the full participation in 
the life everlasting we shall pass into the peace of 
God — not fully till then. How good it sounds — 
peace ! We have wanted that always, and we have 
not known where to find it. We have not under- 
stood that it meant just the giving up of the restless 
will into the keeping of God, and the seeking to live 
in union with God. That is heaven ; heaven is not 
some far-off, inaccessible dwelling of Omnipotence ; 
it is heaven to be at peace, to be one with God. 

We have felt it, that drawing of God, here; 
through all the experiences of our lives there has 
been an attractive power, for God has never left 
us to go our way alone. 



53° MEDITATIONS ON THE APOSTLES' CREED 

I am knit round 
As with a charm, by sin and lust and pride, 
Yet though my wandering dreams have seen all shapes 
Of strange delight, oft have I stood by thee — 
Have I been keeping lonely watch by thee — 
In the damp night by weeping Olivet, 
Or leaning on thy bosom, proudly less, 
Or dying with thee on the lonely Cross, 
Or witnessing thy bursting of the tomb. 

And now, in heaven, God is revealed as he whom 
our soul loved, but saw only dimly. The union with 
him so often disturbed here, is finally accomplished. 

And in its accomplishment another thing is at- 
tained — union with one another. We shall find then 
what the communion of saints means. It has stood 
there in the Creed ; we have repeated it day by day, 
"I believe in the communion of saints"; and it is 
wonderful how little we have ever made of it. The 
Communion of Saints! We are so bound to the 
visible and tangible that we find it almost impossible 
to understand communion with those whom we can- 
not see, or who do not audibly answer us. Yet 
there they are, the great army of the Saints of God, 
passed from our sight to a higher state of being, 
but not therefore so changed as to be alien from 
human sympathies. The greater part of the Catho- 
lic Church is there, in the nearer presence of God. 
And surely we cannot conceive their wandering 
content on the banks of the River of Life, filled with 



THE LIFE EVERLASTING 531 

the glories of the City, and in utter forgetfulness 
and indifference to their brethren who carry on 
God's warfare here. They have eaten no lotus 
which has blotted from their memories the Church 
on earth. What they may know of the details of 
human life is not revealed to us; they know what- 
ever God wills them to know. The important thing 
is not the extent of their knowledge but the exist- 
ence of their sympathy, which they cannot have lost 
save by ceasing to be human. And being assured 
of their sympathy we are sure of their perpetual 
intercessions, the intercessions of those who know- 
ing more perfectly God's will, can ask more surely 
in accordance with that will. 

There is one more thought that I would recall to 
your minds : heaven means service. The idle, semi- 
heathen, pictures of heaven, as a dreamy enjoyment, 
are sensuous and repulsive. That sort of life is 
intolerable even here; intolerable, because we feel 
it unworthy of beings of noble destiny. What ser- 
vice God may call us to after this life, how eternity 
may be filled, we do not know, nor is it very im- 
portant that we should. But we are certain that the 
universe is not so small but that there is work for 
us somewhere. 

And work under what splendid conditions ! No 
trammelling sin, no fierce battles with self first of 
all as to whether we will serve, but to go forth like 



53 2 MEDITATIONS ON THE APOSTLES' CREED 

the angels in the joyous service of him whom we 
passionately love. Just to feel ourselves free to 
serve God with all the abounding powers of a puri- 
fied life. If, amid all the drawbacks of earthly con- 
ditions, the service of God is still the supreme joy 
of a well-ordered life, what shall it be then, — what 
but joy unspeakable and full of glory? 

Heaven is joy and peace and love. How we have 
striven for and longed for them here ; and how we 
have felt that our thought of them was imperfect 
and our attainment of them fragmentary and dis- 
appointing. It could not be otherwise ; for they are 
things only very partially attainable under the con- 
ditions of mortal life. They are things too great to 
be comprehended in terms of mortality. Our con- 
ceptions of them have been but echoes of a far-off 
harmony. We have caught broken glimpses of them 
as of things seen through the rifts of mountain 
mists. Our souls have been smitten with their 
beauty, but it has been as the tantalising beauty of 
fragments of Greek statues, a beauty of parts never 
seen united in a perfect whole. What we have seen 
and known has been enough to attract but not to 
satisfy; it has kept us always seeking a more per- 
fect fulfilment, kept our thoughts always attentive 
and aspiring, 

Here, through the feeble twilight of this world 
Groping — until we pass and reach 
, That other, when we see as we are seen. 



DEC 31 1912 



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